The Stars, Like Dust (Isaac Asimov)

The Stars, Like Dust
Fawcett Crest :: 1950 :: 192 pp. :: paperback (out of print)

In Isaac Asimov's first novel, a part of what I can only imagine must be the painfully boring Empire trilogy, a young man named Biron Farrell wakes up to discover a plot on his life and, his father having been assassinated, jumps on a spaceship with a beautiful, spirited young woman and her caustic uncle to overthrow an intergalactic empire run by the Tyranni, who mostly just collect taxes and assassinate insurgents and wield a "neuron whip" that sounds kind of cool but doesn't exactly save the book.

Apart from an overly simplistic plot riddled with facile moral judgments and a lack of real interest or engagement with the social issues inherent in the fictional world, one of the novel's major flaws is in its characterization. The protagonist, in particular, is a sort of spineless, shapeless reactor to events around him, whose only major characteristic is an unconscious male chauvinism mirrored by the narrative itself.

Artemesia, the protagonist, fatefully sharing a name with a painter famous for being a victim of rape and torture, is introduced like a rather one-note imitation of a Katherine Hepburn heroine. She is spirited and not quite willing to stay within the bounds of propriety in her oddly old-fashioned yet space-travelling culture (a place where she wears skirts and makeup, premarital sex is somewhat frowned upon for women, and she is in danger of being essentially forced into an unwanted marriage). But, of course, rather like Hepburn, she is tamed by a good kiss from a decent man, even retracting her oh-so-bitchy opinions about the quality of food aboard her spaceship as a peace offering. (Though with Hepburn, there was arguably a disconnect between textual tamings of the shrew and the sense that her spirit was never defeated and would resurrect itself, if not by the end of the film, by the beginning of the next. Artemesia sort of just lies down and dies.)

There is little of political interest in this fairly straightforward parable, as one would expect when the villains are actually named "Tyranni." It's a thin novel, a pale, pasty story, with no real conclusion but also no real need to read to the next installment, and the only real interest it had for me was in the blatant misogyny. I know it was 1951, but come on!

In Summary: Graceless and backwards, Asimov's earliest novel is deeply underwhelming.

The Shape of Things (TV-Related) To Come

A few weeks ago, I posted about the TV shows I was looking forward to in the coming season. With a few weeks of the season having passed, I think I have a general idea about what my posting will look like this year. There are some shows that I simply couldn't get into, some that are appointment TV to be immediately recapped and analyzed on this blog, and many on the spectrum between.

Without further ado,

Shows I'll Watch Each Week, Recap, and Review

Heroes: Though this season isn't up to the standard set by last season, I'm not going to pass up a chance to watch half a dozen gorgeous men cavort around saving the world each week, especially when one of them is Milo Ventimiglia.

Gossip Girl: Twistier than Lost, meaner than Mean Girls, and funner than The OC, GG is the highlight of my TV week.


Shows I'll Watch Each Week and Post About Once In Awhile

Pushing Daisies: This show doesn't always need a recap, because each episode is so stand-alone, but I'll definitely post about it semi-regularly, and keep up with it.

Brothers and Sisters: I unfortunately have a work shift during this, which is probably my favorite returning show right now, so I won't always keep up in time, but I won't fall behind with my favorite alcoholic family.

The Reaper: Great show from what I've seen, highly recommended and very funny but also takes place during a work shift, and I'm already weeks behind.

House: Still the same quality as previous seasons (with the only team of writers on any network, it seems, who never phone it in -- so to speak), but falls during the same work shift as Reaper.

Bionic Woman: It takes place during Gossip Girl, so what's a Josh Schwartz fan to do? Will keep up, but not necessarily faithfully; it's not good enough to motivate that kind of dedication.

The Office: This is actually appointment TV for me because my friends all watch it, but I won't be writing full reviews all the time.


Shows I've Dropped Like a Hot Potato, Despite Best Intentions:

ER: Maybe, in half a decade when the DVD release schedule finally catches up to this by-then-hopefully-defunct dinosaur of a show, I will watch season 14. But for now, I'm happy enough that my knowledge stops where Elizabeth Corday did.

Chuck: The world doesn't need both Chuck and The Reaper. And I think Josh Schwartz put all his Funness into Gossip Girl and all his Nerdness into Chuck.

Grey's Anatomy: Never even tried. I just couldn't bring myself to see where my once-beloved show had sunk to.

Cavemen: Could've been so-bad-it's-good, but I never got around to it, so I guess it's not in the cards.

Gossip Girl Review -- 1x05, "Dare Devil"

Recap

After the longest previouslies ever and one of the shortest credit sequences, Gossip Girl informs us of the event of the week: Blair Waldorf's annual sleepover (a tradition since the year 2000, each more decadent than the last, says G.G.) a lavish affair with yummy-looking cupcakes and lavish beauty supplies, for which she is planning in typical over-intense Blair style. But guess who's missing? That's right, Serena van der Woodsen, who is going out on a really-truly date with Dan Humphrey that night. Even the beautiful Dan manages to become unsexy while he prepares for the date by cashing in his piggy bank, which he still has, and which was shaped like a Ninja turtle. He wants it to be perfect, meaning that, of course, it will be a disaster.

But Serena is convinced it's worth missing Blair's sleepover and Blair, cunning as always, lights upon Jenny as a replacement, assuming she'll be an easy target. Jenny, poor dear, is all excited. Meanwhile, Rufus Humphrey is acting as immature as his offspring, wanting to visit his ex-wife in person to give her the news that his ex, Serena's mom, bought her first painting.

Serena's also worried, asking Jenny what to wear on the "surprise" date. Jenny assures her that the Humphrey men do casual Friday every day, but of course, Dan shows up in a suit to the surprise of a jeans-clad Serena. "Talk to me while I change?" she says, weirdly and kind of hilariously. Serena dons a black poufy mini-dress I'm not sure I like, but again, her hair is great, and they head out to a fancy place where a gauche Dan totally embarrasses himself over the menu (because poor people don't know how to behave at nice places, and apparently also don't know that fish can be creamed) and Serena considerately picks up the tab. They decide to move on to play pool in a more casual setting, and the date gets cute, although I loathe with every fiber of my being the ultra-tired boy-teaches-girl-to-play-pool conceit as a method of getting the characters into close physical proximity.

Meanwhile, Jenny shows up at the party with a dorky sleeping bag and even the maid seems to laugh at her. You're thinking She's dead now, if you weren't before, and Gossip Girl chimes in pleasantly, "Hope that Hello Kitty sleeping bag doubles as a parachute!" Ha. The Truth-or-Dare starts immediately with Blair's sidekicks making out. Jenny tries to refuse a martini with "I don't like vodka," but Blair evilly and truly says that it's gin, "as it should be." Peer pressure! Jenny succumbs, and soon the game escalates. When we next see the girls, Blair's pulling a fake-out on the receptionist at the Ostroff clinic so they can break Eric out and take him to a bar. It's quite cute.

Of course, the Ostroff center calls Lily, who immediately calls Serena, who left her phone at home. Desperate, she calls Rufus for Dan's phone number, which he refuses to give for Lily's lame reason that "Eric is missing... from his hotel room!" -- but, showing his true colors, he calls Dan himself and ascertains that Eric's not there. By then Lily's shown up at his door, and she coolly demands that he cook for her, leading to a bit of flirtation and reminiscence.

At the club, Jenny dares Blair to make out with the nearest sketchball, "and mean it," she says, thinking she's all wicked. Blair finds this extremely easy, and saunters back having also lifted the guy's cell phone, just as he crows about his girlfriend Amanda not finding out. She makes Jenny call the girlfriend, and Jenny starts out with, "This is Bla -- Claire." Hoookay. But she immediately picks up her game, following this up with the statement that she just shoved her tongue down the guy's throat, and ending with a Mean Girls-esque grin on her face.

Things come to a nice little climax with the requisite fistfight when Dan and Serena show up at the club to get Eric. Eventually they all leave the club. Serena yells at Blair, but Eric says he's glad for any company other than Serena and his mom, "even if it's Blair -- no offense." So Serena and Dan leave with Eric, Blair leaves with Jenny, Lily reluctantly leaves Rufus. Eventually Lily tells Eric he can come home now for real, and Serena and Dan, out on the streets, make with the smoochies.

The coup of the episode goes to Jenny: Blair dares her to steal a jacket from a mannequin in one of her mom's stores. The girls all run away while Jenny's in there, setting off the alarm, but Jenny manages to pull her escape off with panache, telling the police that she's Blair and that her mom's out of town but she'd left her jacket there, and oh, by the way, I have a set of keys, see? They let her go, and she strolls back in to confront a very surprised Blair with three smaller surprises: she's not staying the night, she's keeping the jacket, and she and Blair are going to have lunch on the steps on Monday. Blair agrees, looking absolutely charmed by this turnaround. As are we all.

Review

Well, what can I say? This show is like crack. It's mocking and mockable and twisty and knowing and also sort of weirdly innocent in the way that CW shows tend to be, with romances sprouting up on the streets of New York all the time and people earnestly talking about "who they are." I like Blake Lively more with every episode -- either she's improving or I'm just lulled into submission by the awesomeness of the show. The lack of Chuck was sorely disappointing, yet Blair brought enough tricks up her sleeve for the both of them, so nothing felt incomplete in this episode. Jenny's transformation was sudden and gratifying, but we all know it can't be complete quite yet -- look for cracks in her facade over the next few months.

In Summary: I'm cutting down the review portions of my posts about Gossip Girl because, as fun as it is to recap, and hopefully helpful for random googlers who missed the episode, I can't just keep repeating "this is awesome" every week. But, yeah. Awesome.

The Lovely Bones (Alice Sebold)

The Lovely Bones
Little, Brown and Company :: 2002 :: Hardcover :: 328 pp. :: $21.95

I assume most people remember when this book was all the rage with the book-club crowd. I saw so many people reading it and heard it recommended by so many of my classmates in high school; Oprah loved it; even Seventeen magazine, which I subscribed to for years, carried an excerpt in its glossy pages. For those who don't know yet, it's a novel narrated by a murdered child named Susie Salmon who looks down from heaven onto the people she left behind. The hype, combined with the prose of the excerpt, which was a little too precious for my tastes, made me completely unappetized by the idea of ever reading it.

But then I went shopping last weekend and, in the middle of a Victoria's Secret dressing room, found a slightly-beaten-up copy of The Lovely Bones sitting on the dressing room table. It said "Not Lost -- Free!" on a Post-It on the front, and was apparently a Book Crossing book. My roommate had once found one, so I knew that it was a sort of system where people leave books in public places for the next person to pick up, read, and pass on. The website keeps track of every book's comings and goings.

There's something delicious and romantic about finding an unexpected book left behind as if just for you. In a crowded store with an impatient line for the dressing rooms, the woman who had left it there somehow got out of the dressing room at a moment my back was turned, so I never saw her. I was excited about my magical find for days, although most of my friends, being less fetishistic than I am about their books, didn't really get why I found it so cool (hopefully some readers of this blog will!).

So I read the book, and to my surprise, I found it absorbing. The concept is original, and the execution is, though trite in exactly the ways you'd expect from a book set in heaven, still graceful. Susie, of course, is one of those schizoid child narrators you find in literature, with frequent deep insights into human nature and excellent vocabulary and poetic syntax, but with random interludes of naivete and simplicity thrown in there to remind you she's a child. She watches her parents' marriage suffer from her death, watches her sister and brother grow up deeply marked by her absence, watches her murderer and her childhood sweetheart and a young woman from her school grow up in the shadow of her murder. The first part of the novel is often moving while it deals with grief, but the end sprawls out over years and meanders to a resolution far too tidy for such a story.

If Sebold had, perhaps, focused more on Lindsey, Susie's slightly-younger sister, who hardens herself in reaction to the murder, I would have enjoyed it more. Dead!Susie's relationship to her sister is part envy, part passionate identification: Lindsey is a kind of surrogate life, the only one of the two who gets to grow up, so Susie follows her through her coming-of-age. "I roved where she roved," Susie says; "in watching her I found I could get lost more than with anyone else." The strange, asymmetrical relationship between the longing Susie and the scarred Lindsey strikes at the heart of sibling-hood in a unique way.

But Lindsey's story is interwoven with those of other characters, most of which I found boring and cliched. I thought that the "miraculous event" promised by the book jacket was hokey, and that for the last 100 pages or so it seemed the novel was simply wandering around in search of an ending (which, when found, was imbued with too much sense of its own meaningful-ness to be effective).

In Summary: I was right to expect that it wasn't my kind of book, but am glad I enjoyed it more than I thought I would. Now I'm off to leave it at Darwin's, my favorite hippie sandwich place in Cambridge. Maybe Ben 'n' Jen will find it!

Heroes Review -- 2x04, "The Kindness of Strangers"

When last we left our Heroes, Sylar had escaped the Company's custody and, though lacking powers, was currently at large and dangerous. This week, calling himself "Gabriel Gray," he joins Maya and Alejandro on the Road Trip That Won't End, discovering that they have "powers" because, though Alejandro's cautious of just blabbing the big secret to any random hitchhiker, Maya is blissfully unaware of the danger she's in. Sylar, unbeknownst to Maya, has already killed the man who escaped from jail with them when he threatened to call the police.

Bennett is still worried about Claire, and, given the picture of her mid-smooch standing over his dead body, especially about her dating someone. She succumbs to West's doubtful charms long enough to go on one date, lying to her dad that she's going to the library. Since the one date involves sitting on the second "O" in the Hollywood sign and some mid-air kissage, Claire decides to keep lying to her dad. She convinces him to let her cheerlead as a cover story for hanging out with West with some sob story about wanting to feel normal. He agrees, saying, "I didn't know it meant that much to you." More than your family's lives, apparently. You'd think with that kind of reason, Bennett might be a little less susceptible to his daughter's wiles. After this is settled, the Haitian appears to tell Bennett he's got a lead on the paintings and they need to go back to Odessa.

In New Orleans, we have the introduction of another new hero. Still no sign of Kristen Bell, but I like this new one, whose name is Monica (Dana Davis). She is Micah's cousin, the older sister of Damon -- a bratty kid around Micah's age whose only goal in life is to watch pay-per-view wrestling, apparently -- and works as a fast-food cashier, but dreams of passing a regional manager test that apparently has only a 2% pass rate. People like her best "friend" and her boss keep shooting her down, telling her to be content with what she has and be grateful, but Monica keeps hoping. She's also taking care of Micah, and is a little disappointed in him when he secretly uses his superpower to get Damon the wrestling for free. It turns out she learns things really fast, and her eyes go all wonky when she watches the wrestling. Then, when a customer pulls a gun on her at the fast-food place, she uses her newfound skills to wrap her hands around a pole and launch herself into an Alias-style kick at the guy's head. I'm sorry, she learned that from wrestling? I'm confused... But Dana Davis is a charming actress, and the sheer weight of the low expectations she's battling because she's poor, black, female and lives in a region battling a disaster make her a sympathetic character.

Molly's still having the nightmares, and Matt's worried about her -- until his investigation of Angela Petrelli pans out. Angela confesses to murdering Nakamura in order to get everyone to let it go, telling Matt via her audible thoughts that she wants him to accept her false confession. Going through her things, Matt and Mohinder discovers a picture of the group of 12 that have been dying one by one, and among them is Matt's father. He wants Molly to help find him, leading to the big reveal that Parkman's father is the boogeyman -- but Matt doesn't care and wants Molly to find him anyway. Suddenly not liking Matt so much. He won't like himself much either very soon, since when Molly uses her powers to locate the boogeyman in Philadelphia she falls into a dead faint. We end on Matt hearing Molly think, "Matt! Help me! Maaaatt!"

Lastly, and most importantly, Nathan, who's still a drunk and still hallucinates the face of a horribly burned man in the mirror, shaves The Beard to please his kids. THANK GODDARWIN.

I found this episode not much of an improvement over the last few, but it did have a little more coherence and some interesting interplay of storylines -- Matt, for example, reveals himself to Nathan, Sylar joins Maya and makes her odyssey a little less irrelevant (although still not in any way compelling), and the boogeyman is given a face, a name, and some emotional relevance. Still, that coherence was only achieved by ignoring Hiro, Niki, and Peter -- kind of a large contingent to sacrifice, and if every episode is so unrelated to the one that's before it, it will be hard to keep caring about each separate thread.

In Summary: Nathan trimmed his beard -- now let's see the writers trim the cast, or learn to use it properly.

Brothers and Sisters: No Sophomore Slump Here!

Though Heroes has been seriously disappointing me this year so far, that's kind of what I expected. After all, remember Lost? The second season was a severe dropoff from which the show has not yet recovered, even though it got more and more popular; Grey's Anatomy had a more consistently well-written and -structured first season than Lost, if a shorter, and became incurably soapy in the second season; Veronica Mars had a bumpy second season all the more stark because of its unparalleled first year;Joan of Arcadia didn't survive to year 3...we all know the drill. The sophomore season is supposed to suck, right?

Brothers and Sisters, on the other hand, hasn't had a noticeable drop in quality. This is a sadly underrated show, probably in part because it stars Calista Flockhart of Ally McBeal fame -- the reason I began watching without any expectation of taking it seriously. I was surprised to find that, despite the absence of any dancing babies, hallucinatory or otherwise, Brothers and Sisters was one of the most honest portrayals of family life I've ever seen.

Last year's arc was made clear in the pilot, when all five Walker brothers and sisters had to confront their patriarch's death and the subsequent revelation of his secret life with a mistress (and a love child who came on the scene later on). This gave the first season a fair amount of cohesiveness, and most episodes followed a surprisingly effective formula: at least one soapy secret is shared with at least one Walker sibling, who is then sworn to secrecy, but promptly breaks the promise, leading to loud public family drama at the end-of-episode party, where the entire clan gets inevitably drunk.

We start the second season with William's death pretty firmly in the past, except in the premiere, which is Kitty's birthday and the one-year anniversary of the death. Holly, the mistress, and her daughter Rebecca have settled into the fabric of Walker life -- Rebecca is definitely part of the family, though tenuously so, while Holly is definitely separate and finally seems almost content that way. Rather than the one big arc of William's death, the family is dealing with Justin's return from Iraq and the pain he undergoes from his wound. But the storylines are rather more diffuse, and often are more like continuations from last year than new ones -- Tommy's dealing with his son's death at the end of the first season, for example, Kitty's still campaigning for Robert's presidency, and Sarah is coming to grips with the end of her marriage. The whole drunken-Walker-family-at-climactic-party conceit has also been much less used so far, and I rather miss it, but it would be out of place for the family to be going to parties with Justin first in Iraq and then so recently returned.

Nevertheless, the show still has this uncanny sense for the rhythms and ups-and-downs of family life, and for the intricacies and quirks and voices of each character. One of the things I also appreciate is the continuity -- the return of Kevin's ex-lover Scotty, for example, in Sunday's episode made me extremely happy, and was effectively used to demonstrate how much Kevin has changed (I also think Kevin and Scotty are being set up for a reconciliation now that they're each rather more mature, and that makes me even happier). People get closure on this show, their histories matter, and their lovers sometimes come back on the scene in unexpected ways for reasons of character and story, not for the purposes of wringing cheap drama out of a current relationship.

Now that I've written the above post, though, I'm wondering if the lack of sophomore slump is merely because these first few episodes will prove to be the continuation of the first season in spirit, and the rest of season 2 will be its own separate entity. In that case I'll have to bite my tongue. Still, I'm extremely satisfied with how this year is going, and I'm glad to see the Walker clan back in full force.

In Summary: Brothers and Sisters is in top form, and deserves to have the hype that the seriously-slumping Heroes is still getting.

Pushing Daisies 1x02 -- "Dummy"

The pilot of Pushing Daisies was possibly the cutest hour of television I've ever seen.

This week's "Dummy" was, however, in a close second, and it didn't annoy me one bit. The show settled nicely into its mystery-of-the-week formula, which I find promising. Chuck resurrected a man who had been found dead on the road and found out only that the guy had been killed "by a dummy." They eventually discovered that the man had been killed to cover up the fact that a certain dandelion-powered car was in fact very dangerous. I definitely feel like with a show whose UST couple is going to be ultra-dead-end, since, you know, they aren't allowed to touch each other or she will drop dead, the week-to-week story is going to be extremely important. And it was beautifully done, managing to pull off what sounds like an overly-cutesy plot on the page with so much self-assurance that you're kind of compelled to come along for the ride (pun intended, natch).

The visuals were, once again, simply stunning. The flowers -- big puffy white dandelions being wielded by Chuck and Ned, a bulimic redhead dressed as a large yellow dandelion -- and the bright green cars and the general over-saturated design all worked wonderfully. The Chuck/Ned thing continued in the path established by the pilot, with Ned installing a glass door between the driver's and shotgun's seat of his car -- with a little hole just big enough for Chuck's little hand to slip into an airtight glove, for hand-holding purposes. I think that part might get annoying, but hopefully they'll mix it up by introducing a love interest for one of them.

The one thing I wasn't sure I bought was Olive Snook's rendition of "Hopelessly Devoted" in the Pie Hole after-hours. I mean... I understand that Kristin Chenoweth is from Broadway or something, and she has a good voice, and it was kind of funny, and I like everyone else in my (girls') school grew up loving Grease, but it was also kind of dumb and ruined the tone.

The other weird tone issue was the bulimia storyline. At first it seemed like our cute redheaded dandelion impersonator was merely a big eater, one of those quirks that this show likes to establish. She would put away an entire pie in one sitting and then ask for more, only in a good mood when she could have her food. It even started to bother me, like, okay, I'll buy that Ned can raise the dead and everything, but I also have to watch this tiny woman eating tons of pie and not getting fat?! PLEASE. Then suddenly Chuck yells at the men for not noticing that the girl has a serious problem, and we see her laxatives fly out of the car she crashes in? It was weird. Binge-eating and bulimia are odd topics for a show so replete with magic and sunshine; unlike death, which especially because it's curable, has more of a romantic and dramatic flavor in this world, taking laxatives to purge yourself of a huge pie is an unavoidably, viscerally unpleasant idea. So it was weird, but on the whole, kind of interesting. I haven't read other reviews of this episode yet (avoiding spoilers) but I'm curious to know what other people thought of it.

Both episodes of Pushing Daisies that I've now seen, I've enjoyed and admired wholeheartedly. Now I want to see some better introduction of our characters, because we all lead busy lives, and in order to keep coming back we have to care.

In Summary: Still not tired of The Cute.

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10/10/07: Pushing Daisies -- Pilot