I Moved To New Zealand

     . . . . After dinner on February 28th, I had no idea I was moving to New Zealand, particularly as I was already living in New Orleans due to NOLA Reconnect 2.  But I opened the first season of Brokenwood Mysteries then, and went for the second episode on March 1st. And there I've been all month every night after dinner. What follows are snapshots of how that happened while it happened.  Emphasis on is on snapshots. This is a fresh set of eyes, from an entirely different part of the world, landing upon a 7 year old television series purely by the happenchance of subscribing to AcornTV.

Brokenwood Mysteries, Six seasons (2014-2019), via Acorn.

     Season 1 (2014) New Zealand.  

The series centers "Senior" (title of address at the police station) Mike Shepherd, a detective in possession of the, by now, overly familiar shticks of the quirky detective.  He’s got a music genre fixation – Mike's is Country (Rebus’s a certain subset of 1960’s rock; Bosch’s is jazz, etc.), coupled with love of good wine (instead of whiskey, Scotch, Irish or beer).

He’s got the out-of-date car, that auto aficionados admire, a 1971 Holden Kingswood, but which, notably does not impress Detective Kristen Simms and Detective Constable Breen, Mike's distinctly much younger, fitter, more attractive and more down-to-earth, second and thirds. They don't like Country music either.  Mike’s an out-of-shape, rumpled mess with multiple ex-wives, whom most women still find very attractive, plus he has a dislike of contemporary technology.

Just off the top of one’s head, how many variations of this detective character can I come up with in 60 seconds, starting with Rebus and Longmire and Vera Stanhope (though sans the music and ex-wives, but she does like her Scotch)? Even Midsomer Murders’ Barnaby, when it comes to tech. Such a contrast with CBC’s  Murdoch’s Mysteries Murdoch's fascination with all new technology.

BM has beautiful, soothing, o so gazeable, rural locations that one never gets impatient seeing, shot in the series’s location in New Zealand’s greater Auckland region (North Island), 

including Helensville, whose post office stands in for Brokenwood’s small, but astonishingly resourced with tech and manpower (unexplained), police station. The closest city, Hamilton, is about 2 ½  hours by car from the fictional Brokenwood. Hamilton is a very minor though significant player in Brokenwood life, referred to constantly as a comparison to tiny (pop. 5000) Brokenwood, as well as a destination -- but we never break screen wall and go there ourselves.

     Gotten through season 2 (2015). Into season 3 (2016) now. Got a kick from the good-natured poking of fun at the crazy fans of the LOtR’s franchise who come to Brokenwood to tour Peter Jackson’s Middle Earth (that this isn't possible is part of the plot!), especially the big felt and foam spider, in the first ep, “The Black Widower.”  Impressed also by its pro environmental and endangered species protection message, for spiders, fresh water sharks, and the forests and the fragile habitats of shore lines. Another clever episode of season 3 was the Christmas episode, “A Merry Bloody Christmas.” which had seasonal, touching bits by Mike as to the belief in Santa as real. It turns out his nephew is an adult Down’s syndrome person, who receives tremendous joy from Santa, true joy, not commercial, not made-up or delusional, but true joy. This is the season the series revealed itself more clever in its writing than might perhaps be expected from the previous seasons. And sensitive too, but never ever sentimental, which isn’t possible even for Mike, who seems to possess a bit of second sight and romantic viewpoint, due to younger, thus more cynical, and down-to-earth, Simms and Breen.

     Into season 4 (2017) now. We’ve already recycled domestic abuse and in-the-closet stories, and now we are here again. I’m getting the sense this show isn’t in the least concerned with consistency of tone, or attitude. It seems focused far more on character, which, increasingly, as the minor regulars re-appear in the episodes, and characters from past episodes return, seems to remind the viewer that ultimately character is fixed.  Once a murderer – be prepared, s/he will murder again  -- particularly she.

     Season 5 (2018) They are going for episode fill-ins around the main plot, having Kristin sort- of-intrigued-by, but not interested by the courtship of Kahu, a gorgeous and smart young Maori, --  and somewhat of a playa. He is not the Maori character, Jared. (played by Hema Taylor) from earlier seasons, who was the only “cool” character on the show. The website for the series says nothing about Jared’s disappearance, or the sudden arrival of his ‘cousin,’ Kahu Taylor (played by Rawiri Jobe). Jared’s character reappears at the end of the season; the website says nothing about the reappearance either. I was glad to see his return. Throughout, the season also turned more bonkers, because so many of the characters are classified out-and-out as, ah, um, mentally disturbed, shall we say. Some of these are seen in other episodes too.  The most deranged of this season’s episodes is #4, “Dark Angel,” the plot of which centers the derelict Brokenwood Institution for the Insane.

     Season 6 already! (2019) Over the last two – three seasons, re-inserting characters from previous episodes into storylines of the later episodes.  It’s a good plan.  It makes BM more of a ‘village’ mystery series. But it's also darker even if more cosy than ever.  First episode of 6th season is set within Brokenwood’s steampunk community, “The Power of Steam” – PLUS – we have an incel.  Holy cow.  Is this the first depiction of Steampunk culture – as opposed to attempts to make movies, etc. from it? on screen? This isn’t a pleasant view due to quite unpleasant characters.  Certainly, inclusion, despite the trumpeting the the big point of the steampunk community is inclusion for the excluded, is not (always) the point, as depicted in the community's cast. or in the story line . . . .  Woo -- the final episode, “Dead and Buried,” brings back three female characters, all murderers, from past seasons.  They are in the private, for profit, Brokenwood Women’s prison, which isn’t like any prison one is going to encounter in the US – and maybe not in New Zealand either. Yoga classes? Knitting classes with real knitting needles? Shouldn’t this population -- as we know the characters from previous episodes -- be in an asylum for the criminally insane?  The female warden wears 5 inch stilettos, form fitting, sexy, yet elegant fashionable outfits – this seems more like a subset of porn that was once and maybe still is, of women in prison.  Plus, we got a lot of butch going on. But then, BM has had many episodes that include teh gay, one of whom is the minor, but recurring pharmacist character, who in the course of the series, becomes Brokenwood’s mayor.

This is an odd series, maybe we could use ‘quirky’ to describe it?  It didn’t seem to start that way, but somewhere in season 3 it started to make a turn to gothic and bonkers, while also, starting with the fake Peter Jackson locations for the LOTR films, getting in, sub rosa, comments about diversity and inclusion, the evils of raping the environment and destroying creatures generally, and endangered ones, particularly. These are the moments that have kept me watching, because while embedded entirely plausibly, they always come unexpectedly. One almost wonders if these 'message' moments are so deliberately composed that unless one already has gotten the message the watcher won't notice?  But I still appreciate them.

Most of all, because without them, one wouldn’t keep watching at all, it's the chemistry among the cast of characters that keeps one watching. The writers never made the dreadful error of attempting to manufacture chemistry or interest in the characters’ interactions via that exhausted “Will the male and female detectives finally recognize how hot they are for each other and DO IT!”  Brokenwood Mysteries doesn’t Do That.  Thank goodness.

I looked forward to spending time after dinner every night with Superior Mike Shepherd, Detective Krista Simms, Detective Constable Sam Breen and Medical Examiner, Gina Kadinsky, and the chemistry among them manufactured by their shared work. I like these people! I liked getting to know a lot of the other, minor characters too, not least Frankie “Frodo” Odos, as the guy for whom nothing ever quite works out, and Mrs. Jean Marlowe, who really does know everything about everyone in Brokenwood, without whom Shepherd would never solve a single murder.

     Season 7 (2020) of Brokenwood Mysteries begins on Acorn Tv on March 29th.  Then it will all really be over. 

Louise Penny: New Bestie, New Project

     . . . . So. Big News in publishing.  No, not in this case, the merger of Penguin-Random House and Simon & Schuster.  Louise Penny’s writing a thriller with her new bestie, Hillary Clinton about a baby Secretary of State.

The only interesting thing really, reading the latest Penny, All The Devils Are Here (2020), was feeling with every sentence, on every page how separated we were from milieu and concerns from what brought us to Penny's Gamache novels in the first place: interesting, variegated individuals, in long-time relationships and community with each other, in a 'normal' sort of place, particularly Three Pines, and what happens when the abnormal disturbs the normal condition.

Here, we're not in Three Pines, or even Montreal or Quebec, or even Canada, but in Paris. We don't have a mad poet and duck, or a loving gay couple and their B&B, and all the others living in the beautiful, rather isolated rural, forested Three Rivers geography, but  the very high-powered, very wealthy, very politically connected, multi-national, legal, enforcement and financial figures and milieu.  This background, this late, on Gamache, that he's from entitled and privileged family and guardians -- had not previously penetrated into the Gamache universe composed of 15 previous novels.  That's a lot of universe to leave out this foundational platform of Gamache's character.

In this 16th Gamache novel, I didn't hear Gamache, I heard Clinton's voice, as in her What Happened, published post the 2016 election, constantly referencing her many internationally wealthy friends, their palatial estates in the DR, etc. -- without sensibility toward those outside of those rarefied circles that have forgotten, if they ever knew, what it is like to fly coach, not in presidential or billionaire luxury. What Happened is exactly what happened -- no touch with what life is for people who aren't comfortably within her circles of involvement.  It looks like Penny got star-struck.

I didn't like All the Devils Are Here, for all those reasons.  It's off-putting, possessing nothing of what brought me back, book after book, to Gamache's world.

That Penny had gone as far with that world that was possible shows strongly in the previous two – three titles, which were flattened, over-stretched, rather implausible and lacking the sort of engagement with the characters and milieu we loved in the long string of books that preceded them.  So she wanting to do something different is understandable.  But her choice to shoe horn her new interests – and her new, insider access to a wider and vastly more powerful mise en scène – into the world of Gamache, was an error of sensibility the same as Clinton’s.  It too is flat while simultaneously, not a bigger world, despite the scope, but claustrophobic, which Three Pines was not, despite being so defined.

Penny's was same mistake, the failure, that cost Clinton an election, has cost Penny (and Clinton) a reader.

One cannot help but speculate as whether or not the Clinton-Penny State of Terror "baby" protagonist, Secretary of State, fated to put the world to rights, will also, like President Clinton, and Obama's Secretary of State, HRC, will install a bottomless corrupt and brutal regime in Haiti to protect the international business interests, as well as the Clintons' own business interests.  Interesting, hmmmmmm?

Ireland Is Not The Western: Tana French's The Searcher

      . . . . These Are Some Times, happenin', eh? since I last posted.  The night before last el V was wakened by a clap of thunder from the big storm pounding the City.  He woke with a cry, leapt from the the bed, madly scrembling for clothes, yelling at me to get dressed and GET OUT! thinking a bomb had fallen.

That was the night I'd finished reading Tana French's The Searcher (2020). With this novel, she's back to earlier form, and in some ways surpasses the earlier books that were very good themselves and made her justified reputation. The critics one and all informed us at the top The Searcher is modeled on one of John Ford's swan songs of movie Western, The Searchers (1956). I know where the critics tipped to that idea, or think they did, most likely because they were told so think that by the press release. 

That’s the single weak element in French’s novel  – ruminations about young males and masculinity and the closing of the US's old West.  Ya really think an old guy in Ireland is gonna muse on that? Or a Chicago cop retired to Ireland?  One feels compelled here to speculate: did French read Greg Grandin’s The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America, published in March 2019, while engaged writing this novel. It sure feels like it because those few sentences seem grafted from some other place upon a narrative and tone that otherwise feels organically sprung from the place where the novel is set, which sure as hell is the greatest antithesis to the vast, dry spaces of the west Texas-New Mexico-Arizona territory of Ford’s The Searchers.

Rural East Ireland

The rest of the elements in French’s The Searcher are also the inversion of the elements of Ford’s film, most of which I won’t mention for fear of spoilers, which would be a pity. But one can safely state that John Wayne, playing an ex-confederate, is nothing like French’s protagonist, Cal, the protagonist and point-of-view, a retired Chicago cop, dropped into an out-of-the-way contemporary rural community on the island of Ireland. Thus I truly wish the critics had shut up about The Searchers, because it’s a red herring, which adds nothing to the narrative, but rather, to the discerning reader, rather detracts.

The reason this novel is satisfying is because it doesn’t follow any previously generic template.  I can almost always predict exactly where things are going, etc. in any genre of fiction (or movie or television show), at this point.  But not in this novel of French's. 

Among the charming elements, the novel contains a Greek chorus of  ravens, the keen observers, commenting on the action and particularly upon Cal. He views them as a community, with both group and individual personality and expression.  When he thinks to himself the ravens are laughing at him, you agree, from the description of their action and sound. French does this though, without anthropomorphicizing the birds. The protag treats them with respect, and despite having a shotgun, and a being a hunter, he wouldn't think of shooting them, especially just for fun. It's deep rural Ireland, and the ravens belong there.

I took 5 nights to read it -- not binging through (not there's time anyway to binge through a novel in These Times).  It's so well written word for word and composed in rise and fall of action, with lovely rest places now and again, one is happy not to dash through in a single burst, but linger in the world of the novel for a while.

John Ford's The Searchers

Prisoner of Zenda (1984) - The Devil Always Gets Into It

     . . . . Prisoner of Zenda BBC (1984); novel (1894). This production lacked only a decade to have made it an anniversary celebration of this classic adventure tale, that has been adapted in many forms ever since publication.  But if it had been made in 1994, the characters would likely not have been quite as noble, maybe?  It's kind of fun to speculate, even though it's fruitless as it didn't happen.

I fell love with this old BBC miniseries, oddly enough.  I didn't care for the Ruritania or George Barr McCutcheon's Graustark books much, even though I encountered them relatively early (for me), like the summer between junior and senior h.s. years.  Even then these books seemed too glib in terms of how and what happens -- and most of all, I could not believe in Ruritania or Graustark as independent monarchies existing in the late 19th C Europe after Bismark's unitary success pulling all those German principalities, dukedoms, etc. together out of the ancient jigsaw of the Holy Roman Empire. Even then I knew about the Germanies and the Holy Roman the Empire then, though what I knew as sketchy.  It was all those years of church school studies,but I did know by then the German states were no longer it was parts of the Holy Roman Empire -- or as they called it even still, then, the Empire. It was now Germany, so this little place could not have had a king.  It could have a princeps, a duke, or something else equivalent but not a king!  Even Queen Vicky's Hanover family's kingdom was annexed by Prussia in the mid-1860s.

Indeed, I laughed every time I saw the Prussian Iron Cross worn by the characters in this BBC production -- though of course made of precious metals and studded with jewels and hung on jeweled gold chains.  would have been furious to see this honor that he devised intentionally to be the equal of honor of whoever it was awarded to, however rich, whatever rank or class, no matter how poor or lowly. This is why it was made of Prussian iron. That wouldn't be possible, not in an independent kingdom by a monarch and his entourage, etc. because it was Prussian! Also the Ruritanian crown was a enclosed crown, which only emperors or pope are entitled to wear.  Mere monarch have open crowns.  Historian's nitpicks.

But watching the way this BBC production rolls and all its subtext, was so much more engrossing than the books.  It's sly and cheeky in all kinds of way that the books never were. It really plays up the Great British Empire upon which the sun never sets with Rudolph Rassendyll, a man of little money, position or accomplishment beyond his good schooling and Britishness, who shows he's better fit to be a monarch than any monarch. It shows how quickly someone who is king for a day becomes accustomed to being king forever -- yet, Rassendyll is so honorable, at least as honorable as the honorables with whom he falls in with.  Not the least honorable is Princess Flavia.

Most of all I enjoyed how efficiently this slender novel was turned into 6 episodes, each a bit less than a half hour.  Nothing was sacrificed. The pacing and rhythm were perfection.  People don't know how to write like for the screen that any more.

Rudolph Rassendyll, who has been crowned King Rudolph V, and who has successfully rescued the true Rudolph V from a dire plot to murder him and put a regent on the throne of Ruritania, departs for the train, leaving Ruritania, and the woman who he loves and who loves him, behind forever.

"God doesn't always make the best men kings," observes loyal courtier, Fritz van Tarlenheim.

Wise Colonel Sapt responds, "The devil always gets into things."

Yet it was lovely to find a respite from black evil and destruction for those bits of time watching Prisoner of Zenda, in which honor and goodness win.

Streaming from Amazon Prime, for which, as mentioned a while back, I have been gifted a membership.

Reading Wednesday - The Fifth Heart by Dan Simmons - No Spoilers

Dan Simmons is well known as the author of such expansive science fiction and fantasy novels such as the Hyperion and the Endymion series. The list of his novels is long, and almost all their titles a classical references, meaning classical in the sense of Greco-Roman mythology as seen above, or 19th century English and American literary canon, from Drood (Charles Dickens) to Carrion Comfort (Gerard Manley Hopkins) and The Hollow Man (which whether or not in T.S. Eliot it was "Men" still brings the poet to mind) -- and even Endymion, beyond the Greek myth is also a poem by Keats).

Simon's latest novel, The Fifth Heart (2015), mashes together several nineteenth  bold-face names in American and English Gilded Age fiction and history, authors and characters alike. This is a fin-de-siècle era meta novel of genres, a text constructed upon a variety of narrative and point of view modes. *

The tale's hub is the 1885 mysterious suicide of Clover Adams, historian Henry Adams wife. The narrative opens in 1893 with Sherlock Holmes, who is in the midst of his three-year disappearance after the events at Reichenbach Falls;  he's accepted the assignment -- presented to him by whom? --  to investigate what Holmes has been assured was not a suicide but Clover's murder. Though Holmes appears certain from the very beginning of the novel that Clover was murdered, suicide is also a theme from the first pages.

Present from the beginning too, is Henry James, who introduces Holmes to John and Clara Hay, Sherlock's companion, so-to-speak in his assignment, and who narrates in the manner of his own novels, as the detached, but invested observer, such as Fanny Assingham in The Golden Bowl.  However, there other narrations going on in this novel, to which drawing the reader's attention the narrative voice(s?) go out its / their way to do.

Among the historical figures we have the character of John Hay, who was the unpaid second secretary to President Lincoln during the Civil War, serving as assistant to the official secretary, John George Nicholay.  After the war, Hay tried his hand at journalism, worked abroad for the state department, co-authored with Nicholay the ten- volume Abraham Lincoln: A History (1890).  Hay married banking magnate Amasa Stone's wealthy daughter, Clara Louise Stone, in 1874, making a salary moot for the rest of his life. Settled in Washington D.C., he served in various capacities at elevated levels of government, including as Secretary of State for presidents McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt.

Clara Stone Hay by Anders Zorn (1860–1920),

Clarence King on far right. King was an American geologist, mountaineer, and author. He served as the first director of the United States Geological Survey from 1879 to 1881. He also was perpetually broke. Adams and Hays often bailed him out.

Henry Adams, my favorite American historian, invented the discipline of medieval history for academia in the United States at Harvard. He wrote the brilliant multi-volume history of the administrations of Jefferson and Madison, which as great-grandson and grandson of the two Adams POTUSes, he was in the most excellent of positions to do. He wrote copiously for the high end journals of the day and also for newspapers, particularly in the run-up to the Civil War. His quirky, self-embittered Education of  Henry Adams covers a lot of the ground leading up to the Civil War, and the war as conducted abroad, who, as son and private secretory to Francis Adams, a senator and once presidential candidate for the Free Soil party, and the head of the Lincoln's Legation to St. James, put Henry again in the best position to do. He wrote two anonymously published novels, both of which are rumored to have a female figure modeled on Clover Adams.The political novel, Democracy, was vicious about presidents Grant and Garfield.  Some say that Andrew Johnson was also satirized in Democracy -- but it's not possible to satirize the disaster that Johnson and his administration were. As an Adams, with a brother who was very good at making money, Henry Adams was a comfortably wealthy fellow.

Hay and Clara, Henry Adams and Clover, in company with the most manly of them all, Clarence King (King could give Theodore Roosevelt more than a run for the money in the outdoor manliness race), formed the most select of social circle clubs, calling themselves The Five of Hearts. Adams and Hay were such close friends their mansions were built adjacently, on D.C.'s H Street. It was their friend, Clarence King, who, without an abode of his own, presented the Five of Hearts club with the famous five hearts-embossed tea set and stationary. Receiving a summons on that stationary to drink tea on H Street would bring even "a president running barefoot across town in the snow" -- though the White House was just across Lafayette Square from the club's H Street mansions, so such an invitation might not quite as much a heart stopper as the clubbers believed.

The American class system is a strong theme running through The Fifth Heart. Henry and Clover, John and Clara, Clarence King, by the advantages of birth, possess the wealth and power that put them at the apex of privilege.  Henry James, by virtue of his own family's solidly middle-class intellectual affiliations, is among the intellectual and artistic elite, acceptable to the company of the highest-toned aristocrats. However, James lived mostly abroad because the U.S. is too raw for him. Naturally then, it is James who meditates on who is and who is not a gentleman and what a gentleman is and does. Neither is he manly, nor is he rich -- he frets constantly about his lack of financial and popular success. And there's that shifty, unidentified narrator, who keeps drawing attention to -- we presume -- himself, and who narrates extensively upon the others' speculations about who belongs and who doesn't. Finally there's Sherlock, who is no gentleman at all, not even American, and, unlike the others, a character.

Also, Sherlock is tall.

Presumably then, the title itself says that in some way The Fifth Heart is in dialectic with the Five of Hearts club.  We should keep in mind that the average of the combined heights of all five of the members of The Five of Hearts Club was 5 feet 3 inches. These were little people.  Their room for drinking tea with their Hearts tea set was made with furniture and other furnishings scaled to their littleness. They were little in other ways: anti-semitic (Adams), anti-woman (King) and anti-immigrant (Hay). They were snobs, mean with their snobbery, and provincial in their snobbery, for all their traveling in other climes and acquisition of the most rare, expensive and beautiful objects of art and decoration. They could have come out of James's The Golden Bowl, Daisy Miller and The Americans.

This is a novel all of whose elements (except, perhaps Holmes) are of great import to me as an historian, particularly Henry and Clover Adams.  Hay, like Nicholay and Adams, are essential to the understanding of so much American history. For a long time Henry James was my favorite novelists. A novelist who mapped many of his characters directly upon the people he knew. This includes the Adamses, as in his short story, "Pandora", in which the central figure is Henry Adams.

I personally am certain that Clover Adams tragically took her own life.

Melancholia, as the disturbances brought by depression and bi-polarity were known as in those days, ran in her family on the maternal side.  She and Henry were no longer as close as they had been initially. Much of that was Henry Adams's own bitter disappointment that his great historical studies of early America, Jefferson's and Madison's administrations, did not achieve praise and wide readership. It is also hinted the bitterness came because he'd never become POTUS, or even a Senator.  (It was said among various of his contemporaries that born with a silver spoon in his mouth, Henry Adams expected the presidency would be given to him on a silver platter, nothing he had to work to get.) Another contribution was his sense that he was born into a world for which he hadn't received the training to be successful -- something that happens to many people as they age, and the world changes rapidly.

Ultimately a self-centered fellow, Henry didn't, or couldn't, provide Clover the tender attention she should have been receiving -- and as well, schooled in New England repression, she rejected attention, comfort and succor.

That Adams's eyes wandered to other, more happy and lively women -- happier and livelier than himself too -- is not anything for which it seems Clover's suicide should be blamed. It was another symptom of her illness, not the cause of suicide. Moreover there are barely even hints that the very physically fastidious Adams ever was physically unfaithful. If infatuation caused Clover's suicide there would have been few wives left alive in the Washington of that era, including Clara Hay. The historical record shows that in 1887, James Tuttleton wrote:

John Hay fell in love with Nannie Lodge, the beautiful wife of Senator Henry Cabot Lodge. Their affair was conducted by indirections so circumspect, in the gossipy Washington society of the time, that their usually “thwarted assignations” could only have caused them both continual frustration. 

There's also a great deal about both Hay and Adams's later life love affairs in Clover Adams: A Gilded and Heartbreaking Life (2012) by Natalie Dykstra.

Henry Adams commissioned this mourning memorial to his wife, Marian (Clover) Hooper Adams. 

More than likely the death of her dearly beloved father triggered a deep depression from which Clover never recovered.

I recoil from mash up fiction generally, but this one, with the characters it has, the historical era, was an exception, so much so I went out of my way to obtain a copy.

-------------------------------

*  Just as a great deal of The Fifth Heart's text is built out from the previous works of Doyle and James, and books about them, and the central figures, such as The Five of Hearts: An Intimate Portrait of Henry Adams and His Friends 1880-1918  by Patricia O'Toole (1990).

Film - Ex Machina - Spoiler Free

Ex Machina, an sf film that has been touted more than once as the best film to be released so far in 2015, opened here some weeks before last week's national roll-out. I saw it soon after PBS began airing Wolf Hall, with which Ex Machina has more than a little in common with Henry VIII's quest for the perfect woman/queen/wife, who all turn into disappointments, sooner, usually, than later, with the exception of Jane Seymour, who quickly provided the king with a son and then removes herself by selflessly dying.

Though Ex Machina's Nathan, king of technology, has a different coloring, his build resembles Henry VIII

Caleb, with his employer, the genius god Nathan. Nathan partly constructed Ava the AI via Calebs porn preferences, which he suveilled and mined, in order to make Ava's Turing Test as complex as possible.

However, Ex Machina and Wolf Hall share another quality, which is male rivals who jostle and jar to prove themselves the smartest, most powerful guy in the room. Wolf Hall's King Henry VIII prided himself on his learning as well as his majesty, and Ex Machina's Nathan, who sets in motion all the action that is the film, as founder-coder of the most successful search engine, the most wealthy man in the world, is arguably much more powerful than a king, and as capricious, entitledly vicious and cruel as any king. Nathan wrote that code when he was 13, and now is obsessed with his AI project. Nathan's brought his younger employee, Caleb, to his Norwegian Fortress of Solitude to perform the Turing Test on Ava (Eve) his latest AI prototype. Is she the AI singularity or not?  Caleb is a different type than Nathan, but he too is very, very smart.

Nathan and Caleb are performing their nerds' version of this.

Part of the film is about the outsmarting game Nathan and Caleb play on each other.

It's also about being God. Nathan, who is an obnoxious though very smart egoist, is enthralled by Caleb calling him God, though Caleb repeatedly corrects his employer with what he actually said, which was that the ability to create actual artificial intelligence would be "like a god, not God." As Caleb is all about the semantics of everything, mechanical and human, this is an essential difference of definition, but Nathan is going with God being himself, thank you, because he's smarter than everyone else.

Which brings us to the title of the film, Ex Machina, from Deus ex Machina, drama's god from the machine . . . .

Does the capacity to create a fully, independently functional, self-aware, artificial consciousness of free will make the man God?  Then we must think, "God is dead," and has been dead a long time before the present of this film.  Our tech-obsessed society killed God, putting the mechanically built God in humanity's God's place.

It is a commonplace that (male) humanity kills its father-God.  But what have females done with fathers and God, other than serve?

Two AIs.  One talks, the other doesn't. One survives, the other doesn't.  It matters not whether the AI has the capacity to talk when they both are programmed to be female.  Like Lucifer, Eve will rebel.

Was it Nathan or Caleb who proved himself the smartest guy in the room?  The answer is irrelevant.  What matters is the next question: what happens now?

Beyond, or below, God, there are many question thrown up by Ex Machina, via the very smart scripting and photography, particularly about what makes up gender, at least of what qualifies as the feminine and the female -- and even, as we see by the still above, ethnicity. These are the questions most critics and reviewers have focused on, though a quick google-through will show they don't all agree on what those questions about men and women are, or what they signify.

Ex Machina, so say the critics, is a movie about ideas, in the best traditions of science fiction, as well as a magnificently constructed and photographed film. So it is, and thus  I went to see Ex Machina again this week. It was a sparsely attended late morning screening; all the audience with the exception of two elderly out-of-town hetero couples and me, were white men between the ages of 20-something and mid-30's.  In the meantime mothers and fathers of all colors and heritages and ages were streaming into the theater down the corridor, young kids in tow, to see Avengers: Age of Ultron.  If anyone were to ask,  I'd suggest instead of Ultron,  Ex Machina, anytime -- if the questioner is older than 11.

Reading Wednesday - Ancillary Justice & The Silkworm

In fact I stayed up past my bedtime to finish Ann Leckie's Ancillary Justice (2013).  It's a fast read, very well written, which reminded me  throughout of an sf novel published



21 years ago, also in which much of the action is on an ice planet, featuring "characters" of gender

fluidity or neutrality, by another writer of above-average talent, Nicola Griffith's Ammonite (1992).  Both writers and their books are very smart.

What do I mean by this?

For starters, at this particularly moment, particularly in the mystery/thriller/suspense/police procedural genres, the extremely cold parts of our planet are of great interest, i.e. "nordic noir."  The latest entry into this subgenre that began rolling with the popularity of Sweden's Kurt Wallender series (both in print and as two television series -- one on Swedish tv and the other on English television starring Kenneth Branaugh) is Fortitude, where a murder is committed in small town professional scientific community in the Arctic.

The second thing I mean is how Leckie handles gender. In Justice, what is masculine and feminine, or he or she, slides all over the place There are no other markers in the for male or female than pronouns, and those pronouns seem to have quite other significance than sexual identification. The unmarking of gender as identification for sex or hierarchy is of great interest in current sf/f.

The third smart thing is that Justice is space opera. Publishers and readers alike have been wanting updated space opera for a while now, upgraded to a more current reflection of "The Way We Live Now" than the by now quaint treatment of ST and the racist, sexist  Firefly, which underneath, whether or not Whedon realized that's what he was doing, celebrates the slaveocracy rebels of the War of Southern Rebellion (1861 - 1865).

But what is smartest of all about Justice, is that it doesn't come across as smart.  By that I don't mean comes across as dumb, because it doesn't.  What I mean is that the text reads so elegantly in composition and organization, that all these elements are effortlessly there, and centered, while there's a strong plot that, like all stories are supposed to do, pulls the reader along to find out what will happen next. It doesn't draw attention to how smart it is at all.  Instead we simply experience the pleasure of its smartness.

If I had a criticism to make of Ancillary Justice it would be that Orbit, the publisher, gave it an unattractive cover.  Indeed, the cover may be what has kept me away from the book for so long.  The cover's elements are clunky and clumsy, colored with muddy grey and green tones. The cover as depicted in the photo above is of much sharper resolution and clarity of tone than on the book on my desk.

The Silkworm is the second novel featuring private investigator and Afghan war vet, Cormoran Strike, by Robert Galbraith. I didn't actually read it, but listened to it via library audio download during my workouts. The Silkworm's case is set in the publishing industry.

We encounter several novelists and editors and publishing companies, an agent or two. What is interesting to me about this is, as per usual in fiction, and I suppose naturally so, publishing as depicted in the novel is only concerned with novels -- whereas in reality, most of the publishing industry is not fiction, and profits from all forms of fiction are falling. There are a few exceptions to this, and the author of this series, who, as we all know Roberta, is in reality J.K. Rowling, is a mighty exception.

I'm not liking this second Cormoran Strike investigation as much as I did the first one. It feels more like a dutiful fill in the formula blanks for the genre, than the fresh delight that seemed to come through about everything in the first one, The Cuckoo's Calling, from entering extreme high end restaurants and boutiques who cater to the very prosperous, to packs of ravening paparazzi. This delight in exploring the new, distilling the author's own experiences of entering the world of private cars and drivers, hair stylists and designers, the deference and perks with which the celebrated are received everywhere, covered a lot of the clumsiness of composition.

This second time around, not so much, particularly the habit of preceding each chapter with a quotation from plays, mostly out of the Jacobean era of English drama. No more than the Latin quotations at the head of each chapter of Cuckoo's Calling, do these quotes seem to illuminate either character or action, or do only occasionally. They feel irrelevant, because Cormoran Strike, our protagonist, doesn't have knowledge of either Latin or the history of English literature, and certainly doesn't give a damn about either one. The epigraphs are tacked on decorations rather than integrated, graceful ornaments. Whether or not this was the author's intention, their function seems to be reader reminders that Galbraith is really Rowling, who is educated and smart. This kind of error in presentation she never made in the Harry Potter series.

I probably won't be reading any more Cormoran Strike books.  But I will read Leckie's second, Ancillary Sword -- though when I don't know, so much work, so many projects are stacking up.  Maybe on the plane to NO for the Caribbean Conference at the end of the month?

It's Reading Wednesday

However, due to the Work Trip Travel from Hell, and all the issues, including computer woes, related to that, I've read nothing to speak of since July 10th.

On the 10th I read enough of the historical  "police mystery" novel (Paris, 1870; flashbacks to the War in Algeria, which would have been 1848, which doesn't fit entirely well with the age of the Parisian detectives in 1870), Baudelaire's Revenge. by Dutch novelist, Bob van Laerhoven.  I returned the book to my carry on about 2/3 of the way through, with no intent to finish it. The women are grotesques, who, morally rotten, are rapidly rotting physically. They are fairly implausible characters, though a certain segment of Parisian men such the Goncourt Brothers, and cosmopolitans such as Dickens and his companions, might view women as such surrealist, hyper-active degenerates. This reader, on the other hand, felt in dire need of mental and emotional cleansing. Particularly this is so, as political, social, cultural and material history all inform us that women, along with children and others without legal identity, were the most powerless members of society. What they did, what they were, were actively determined by men, their poverty and lack of other opportunities.

Sigh.



Such choices on the author's part for female characters make the publisher's choice, to portray on the cover, a figure who resembles so closely the title screens of the televised versions of Agatha Christie's Poirot, figure all the more inexplicable.

There are constant infelicities of translation on nearly every page.



So I've read nothing but that horrid book the entire time, with the exception of re-reading for the firswt time in a long while, some splendid pages of William Faulkner's The Unvanquished -- o, how he plays with time, language and pov!

However, today, not only did the splendid UPS fellow deliver my Tony Lama boots* but serendipitously, two novels were delivered by the equally nice Fed Ex fellow (neither of whom are responsible for what it is that they bring me):



1)  Deborah Harkness's concluding volume, The Book Of Life, of herAll Souls Trilogy;




2)  Joe Abercrombie's Half a King, which is probably only the first installment of a series, and a YA series at that, though there's nothing in jacket copy or pr that says so. The only clue is the text's font size -- much larger than one sees in adult targeted readers.

Again, for this reader, it's more than annoyance when nothing informs me that a book is YA, Romance, self-published or religiously themed -- and by golly, sometimes all of them at the same time!

Grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr.

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*  Which, with a few other high points -- all about the work -- made the Texas trip worth doing.

Sexism Makes SF/F Women Writers Tired

This merely another in the series of frequent eruptions of How SF/F and SFWA can embarrass itself and look foolish, sexist and / or racist / and / or whatever other bad mannered and socialization behavior can be engaged in.  Most people on the face of the planet won't know much less care.  This is the sort of thing that made me give up the org and the culture so long ago -- yet, like so many things that are bad for us and our blood pressure, not to mention taking up space in our little brains that could be used so much more profitably -- I can't keep my eyes away from these eruptions.

How every single discussion about Sexism and woman-type stuff on the Internet (and real life) has ever happened and ever will happen, always, forever, until the Earth finally falls into the Sun (or until the Patriarchy is dismantled.)

It goes with this:

"Sexism and SFWA, as seen by a former SFWA president.

Is there any more reason to wonder why sf/f is so riddled with such yahoo-saurian types as consumers and writers? Even when so many -- men and women -- explain.

They cannot and will not and don't want to hear.  Sexism.  It exists.  Get over it. Besides, sexualized female bodies are still the greatest marketing tool of all time, and selling our stuff is the name of the game.

Now there is another thing, the unfortunate editor of the SFWA Bulletin (for which there has never seemed to be an earthly use (so many reasons I left the org), is / was female, and she's resigned.  Undoubtedly the two men who set off this typical sfwa firestorm this time won't resign from anything -- indeed one of them isn't even a member of the org -- but a woman must be punished for their sins.  Because these saurians of the community are untouchable.  There's no other reason their inane and silly maunderings ran for frackin' 15 years in the Bulletin, because this field is all about the Sacred Name and Ancestor Worship.  So the misogyny and sexism and the rest are embedded in the org from the beginning.  It's not going to stop, particularly since this is the field that is the crown of nerd culture, which currently dominates pop culture from top to bottom.

*Revenge* 2 + Pasta

While making Saturday night's pasta and waiting for el V to get back from the studio I watched the last eps of Revenge.

It got more than a little Buffyesque by the last third. We even have a gay computer genius like Willow was, but Nolan's a he, and a billionaire proprietor of a social networking site or something like that. In any case, Nolan's great at any digital application you need performed, from finding the dirt on someone, keeping up hidden surveillance, changing data -- whatever you need he can do. And a billionaire so he can buy whatever or lose whatever and never notice. Several times over. Like Emily-Amanda and everybody else in the show are multi-billionaires, except the poor Stowaway Bar owner. Team Jack -- who ain't got jack, hahaha! -- and his brother, Declan.

We feel the Good Slayer Buffy / Bad Slayer Faith kind of thing with Emily, who is really Amanda, and Amanda, who is really Emily, though this switched identity thing going on is not supernatural. (There's the dead on arrival last season too of Ringer,* with SMGellar playing two sisters, one supposedly good and one supposedly not, both equally comatose as far as the audience was concerned.). 

By the last episode of Revenge's first season we learn there is a whole new level of Conspiracy Badness, which is called ... get this ... the ... INITIATIVE! The final episode had some serious ass kicking between a really Bad Guy and Emily Who Is Really Amanda. I wonder if SMG's fight double did this one too -- the fighting style looked fairly Buffyesque, and, of course, blonde.

So now that the EviLe Witch Queen Victoria is dead dingdong, we have a whole new group of Bads to go after, who were part of killing the Good Dad of Emily Who Is Amanda, and who seem to have Emily Who Is Amanda's mother prisoner. O, and the Bad Dad Grayson, who isn't the dad of Emily Who Is Amanda's half sister Charleotte is still living. And his son, Team Daniel, seems to becoming his Bad Dad -- though his mother, Witch Queen Victoria is dead. But wait! his half-sister, who is also half sister of Emily Who Is Amanda has started down the road to being her Mom who is a total Bad Witch-Bitch, who repented before she got blown to smithereens. This is a soap opera, totally. A Gothic soap opera, no less.

Because it's about the House(s).  Gothic = girl + house, and at least some bad weather.

The location is these two mansions in the Hamptons, plus the Stowaway Bar. And the beach. Except for the Graysons, none of these multiple billionaires has a single servant in their immaculate castles. You never see Emily Who Is Amanda shopping, exercising, getting buffed, mani-ed and pedi-ed or doing any of the things you know billionaire socialites do -- except talk on the phone. That's pretty much what these people do is talk on the phone, even -- particularly! -- at the constant round of parties. They are trapped in these houses. People either don't want to leave like the Mistress Lydia,  are always going to leave like Team Jack, but like the Hotel California (or, you know, these are EviLe billionaires shafting us all, more like Roach Hotel)  they never ever manage to leave. Even if they leave, like Amanda Who Is Emily, she always comes back (and pregnant -- did we mention the third or was fourth time Amanda Who Is Emily returned, she was preggers, with supposedly the baby of Team Jack who hasn't got jack. The same Team Jack that Emily Who Is Amanda is really in love with, her childhood friend.

And thus, Voila! Season 2. Which premieres at the end of this month.

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*Ringer is now available for instant watching on netflix.