“We have no conviction that this is the right point of view from which to criticise the political situation at the current time,†wrote Eliot, adding that he thought its “view, which I take to be generally Trotskyite, is not convincingâ€.
Eliot wrote: “After all, your pigs are far more intelligent than the other animals, and therefore the best qualified to run the farm – in fact there couldn’t have been an Animal Farm at all without them: so that what was needed (someone might argue) was not more communism but more public-spirited pigs.â€
I like Dollhouse, but I’d be lying if I didn’t admit that I wanted to like it more. “Man on the Street” was a fantastic episode, but most of them (including “Echoes,” the most recent) have lacked something.
I think that something is character development. Yeah, I know, I always talk about this stuff, and it’s boring. But still: we don’t get to see characters grow every week. More is revealed about them, sure, but that hardly makes for compelling television. (Or compelling storytelling, even.)
I wonder if the answer would be to take the focus away from Echo. That will never happen, of course, but she’s the one character who is severely hindered, who is designed not to grow. And she’s the main character. Troubling, anyone?
Paul Ballard is awesome, but we’ve yet to see him face any real dilemmas. He’s fundamentally the same person he was in the first episode, only now he’s been shot, beaten up, and suspended from the FBI.
In fact, I’m going to go out on a limb and say the show really ought to center around him. He’s the only good guy who’s a real person. Boyd has potential, but he’s an unsure voice on the inside—not a reliable hero.
Perhaps Joss Whedon can pull it off. Perhaps the network will give him a chance at a second season. But I just can’t see this show working in its current setup. It has so much bone-chilling potential. So much. And yet …
On a side note, who’s willing to bet with me that Caroline’s old boyfriend (Leo) is Alpha? He looks close enough to what we saw in the first episode from behind, and it would totally make sense.
All that said, here’s hoping the show is not squashed. I’d really like to see some awesome movement.
Revolutions create a curious inversion of perception. In ordinary times, people who do no more than describe the world around them are seen as pragmatists, while those who imagine fabulous alternative futures are viewed as radicals. The last couple of decades haven’t been ordinary, however. Inside the papers, the pragmatists were the ones simply looking out the window and noticing that the real world was increasingly resembling the unthinkable scenario. These people were treated as if they were barking mad. Meanwhile the people spinning visions of popular walled gardens and enthusiastic micropayment adoption, visions unsupported by reality, were regarded not as charlatans but saviors.
When reality is labeled unthinkable, it creates a kind of sickness in an industry. Leadership becomes faith-based, while employees who have the temerity to suggest that what seems to be happening is in fact happening are herded into Innovation Departments, where they can be ignored en masse. This shunting aside of the realists in favor of the fabulists has different effects on different industries at different times. One of the effects on the newspapers is that many of their most passionate defenders are unable, even now, to plan for a world in which the industry they knew is visibly going away.
Later…
Print media does much of society’s heavy journalistic lifting, from flooding the zone — covering every angle of a huge story — to the daily grind of attending the City Council meeting, just in case….
The newspaper people often note that newspapers benefit society as a whole. This is true, but irrelevant to the problem at hand; “You’re gonna miss us when we’re gone!†has never been much of a business model. So who covers all that news if some significant fraction of the currently employed newspaper people lose their jobs?
Also…
It makes increasingly less sense even to talk about a publishing industry, because the core problem publishing solves — the incredible difficulty, complexity, and expense of making something available to the public — has stopped being a problem.
I’ve wanted to dislike Marshall McLuhan because of this quote for a very long time. The only thing stopping me is that I’ve never actually read McLuhan, only heard him quoted. So really, my complaint isn’t with McLuhan, but with the folks who use his quote to condemn rock music (because it’s performed by childish men with long hair, yellow sunglasses, and who tend to scream on stage while dancing something that can’t be anything but perverted).
But I realized something today: this quote describes one of the reasons why I have a tough time liking postmodern fiction.
Watch a postmodern movie (say, Broken Flowers, or Happy-Go-Lucky, or The Darjeeling Limited). Maybe this is just me, but I’ve left these films (and countless others, not to mention the stories) dissatisfied. I keep searching for an indicator of where we are in the story, but it never comes. It’s just suddenly over, and then I’m left to figure out just what was going on after the fact.
This doesn’t inherently condemn them. What does, however, is that all too often they a) don’t have a coherent message and b) have very little resembling a consistent storyline.
What’s a storyline? Well, let me put it this way. I’m all about focusing on characters and plots. Without both, a story is usually sunk. But let’s face it, we (as humans) are cerebral beings. We need a theme. Just having the same person in every scene, or a similar problem over and over again isn’t enough. There needs to be an overarching question, and by the end of the story, there really ought to be an answer which displays some sort of growth. (Are the exceptions to the rule? Of course. But they’re almost as rare as third nostrils.)
Which brings us to the message bit. I’m not looking for a neat and tidy moral—not every story needs to (or should be) a replica of one of Aesop’s fables. But with every theme goes a message. Or, put another way, the answer. Which is where many postmodern stories get in trouble. They just don’t have one, and their inability to properly end a story shows it. They don’t have any other option than to crash land a story because they don’t understand themes or storylines.
This probably doesn’t all make sense, but I’m working on it. And not to take down postmodernism, or even postmodern stories. Simply just to extol the simple story, the one that even a child could love. Because life is anywhere near as confusing as many postmodern pagans would have us believe.
Canada’s current Minister of Immigration and Multiculturalism has been poking around at some wasp nets lately. From an entertainment standpoint, it’s a relief: newspapers are so incredibly tedious when all they do is blather on about this or that economic problem which will likely send us all into a freefall to hell.
The story of this minister, named Jason Kenney, should interest each of my fellow HPNers. His aim, according to the National Post, is “to reinvent Canadian multiculturalism.”
Rejecting the CAF’s support for Islamic terrorists and arguably anti-Semitic messages, Mr. Galloway for financially supporting Hamas, calling for newcomers to better integrate: These are of a piece with efforts to fortify what the Conservatives would call The Canadian Identity. It is, Mr. Kenney makes clear, a vision for a country that stands up for its pluralism, but also for its core liberal traditions of tolerance, democracy and secularism. “We can’t afford to be complacent about the challenge of integration,” he says. “We want to avoid the kind of ethnic enclaves or parallel communities that exist in some European countries. So far, we’ve been pretty successful at that, but I think it’s going to require greater effort in the future to make sure that we have an approach to pluralism and immigration that leads to social cohesion rather than fracturing.”
It’s a bizarre mixture, made even more so when you learn that’s he a Catholic whose staffers include a Muslim, an Armenian, and a Tibetan. Oh, and he actually boarded a refugee family in his own home a few years back, giving him hands-on experience with how immigration works.
His platform is far from wholly commendable. But it is refreshing to see someone who recognizes that integration is vital to successful immigration, and yet who doesn’t sound like anyone from the recent Bush administration.
3) The library would contain no books of literary criticism, and the only critical exercise required of students would be the writing of parodies.
Ironic, considering that Auden wrote several thick volumes of what is best described as criticism. Still, can’t say I blame him. One would hope that we could one day learn to read and absorb without requiring a literary dissection or lobotomy first.
Two things strike me as I read this article. The first is that anger toward “the banks” or even “AIG” is too broad, too inhuman, and too glib.
The second is that this Jake DeSantis, though martyr he may seem, received a retention check of $742,000, that’s after tax, which is more than 30 times the median income level on the Palouse. This is another post unto its own, but this man would have made in one year what many of our neighbors could not make in 30 – most of their adult working lives – and I suspect that all of the economic theory in the world couldn’t convince me that this is good for anybody at all.
At least the story ends with charity. I like that. Giving is one of the few genuine remedies we have left.
Rolling Stone has a great article about the Economic Spazzfest currently underway in the United States. It is helpfully colloquial, and has a genuine spleen to it that I found surprising and refreshing.
Two things of note:
1. Markets presumably move capital toward more efficient agents. It’s more or less an Economic Darwinism: folks who work hard and innovate to create competitive advantages will end up with the money. It’s the American Dream, Protestant Work Ethic, bootstraps and all that. How, then, did all of this money end up in the hands of people who clearly misunderstood something fundamental about money?
2. More to the point, I suppose: why, recently, have I been hearing the best economic analysis being done by Rolling Stone and Comedy Central? When did the Dead Heads and Pot Heads get wise?
