Month: April 2010

Monday various

Sunday’s end

Something happened today while I wasn’t really paying attention. That something? Sunday. Somehow the day just sort of passed right by.

Not unpleasantly, of course, but beyond finishing Craig Ferguson’s funny and surprisingly touching memoir, American on Purpose, watching an episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000 (1983’s dreadful Warrior of the Lost World), and failing to finish the Sunday New York Times crossword puzzle, I’m not sure I can really say how I got from there to here.

Sundays are just like that sometimes.

Unlike any other

“It struck me that distant cities are designed precisely so you can know where you came from. We bring home with us when we leave.” – Colum McCann, Let the Great World Spin

“She wheeled from him, resenting his attempt to scoff away such wonders. The bit of poster had spun a new world before her, excited her, given wild, soaring impetus to her imagination; and now, without in the least understanding herself, she wanted that excitement and the soaring, even though it might stab and rack her, rather than the barren satisfaction of believing that in life there was nothing better, nothing more vivid or dramatic, than her own stableyard.” – Sinclair Ross, “Circus in Town”

I keep meaning to talk more about the books I’ve read lately, starting with China Miéville’s The City & The City. It’s recently been nominated for a Hugo Award, but what I keep coming back to more than anything else is this little piece of description from the jacket copy: “set in a city unlike any other”. And I can’t help but think that this is both fundamentally true and completely and totally false.

Because here’s the thing: without spoiling much, it’s almost immediately apparent just how different Miéville’s twin cities of Beszel and Ul Qoma are from any in the real world, and yet they are both recognizably real cities. They have to be, because as readers that’s where we live — in the real world — and as much as we may look to fiction for escapism and elements of the fantastic, I think what we ultimately want are characters whose own wants and desires, whose problems and decisions are, if not our own, than at least inescapably human. I think this is a reason it’s so difficult for science fiction to create aliens who are truly “the other” — one reason why they’re so often just humanoids with nose ridges or pointy ears or some other single defining trait. Because science fiction, and maybe all fiction, isn’t really about the other; it’s about how we, as humans, react to it. The metaphysics of Miéville’s book are dizzying, but it’s the human side that grants us entry.

It’s telling, I think that he set it against the backdrop of the real world, with the two cities interacting with the United States and other nations, rather than in his fictional Bas-Lag universe. These are cities that could have easily been at home in that world, but it’s clear that Miéville needed the trappings of this world to make his story feel more real.

The story shows us wonders, but by setting them in the real world, it makes them all the more attainable.

How I spent Saturday

Today was a pretty good day.

I woke up early to bring my car in for its yearly inspection and an oil change. My father was kind enough to give me a ride over, and then back again later to pick the car up. There used to be a pretty convenient train in the morning that would take you from the mechanic (half a block from the station) back to our station (one block from the house), but the LIRR saw fit to muddle with their schedule and only run trains once every hour between those two stations. So it’s just easier to get a ride.

I didn’t do a whole lot else today. I went for a long walk, and I took a very successful nap, and I played with the dog. I also watched a little television.

I watched another episode from the first season of Fringe — I keep waiting, I think maybe in vain, for it to get better than its pilot, which I watched when it first aired last and didn’t love. It’s not an uninteresting show, kind of a glossed-up X-Files, but right now I’m not seeing a whole lot to make me revise my original opinion of the show.

The second episode of the new Doctor Who fared a little better, though I do think it coasted by a little too much on costumes and set design and ultimately couldn’t hide what was a little thinness in its story. It was clever and fun — and thank goodness they didn’t do that click-click-click what-did-the-Doctor-just-see thing again — but it felt strangely cut short. (There were a couple of minutes at the end that were nothing but establishing shots for next week’s episode.) It wasn’t at all disappointing, but that delightful sense of wonder I felt last week did feel a little under-served by the end this week.

And then I got caught up on the last two episodes of Chuck, while I pulled together issues of Kaleidotrope (which with luck will be mailed out before next weekend is out). I’m occasionally mystified by Chuck‘s difficulty in pulling in a bigger audience — it’s a fun action comedy with some great characters — but if the show has to end this season, “Chuck Versus the Other Guy” was a several steps in the right direction and just a cool episode to boot. (Nice to see Mark Sheppard continuing his plot to appear in every television show on the air. Also nice to see, however briefly, Ida from “The Middleman”.)

And finally, this evening, I watched The Informant, starring Matt Damon. It’s kind of an odd movie, but that’s probably because it was a pretty odd story. I don’t think it’s spoiling anything to say that Mark Whitacre is a fascinating character — if you haven’t already hear the This American Life show about his case and all its convolutions, you should. I thought Damon did an excellent job portraying a man who just keeps lying, it seems, because he just doesn’t know what else to do. It’s actually a pretty fun movie, despite all that, and is more a dark comedy than anything else.

And that, such as it was, was my Saturday.