"Why I'm mad at Stephen Jones"

Sometimes people really just have to listen to Stephen King. I mean, the guy’s sold how many books? I think he might know a thing or two about publishing. And even before he became the self-titled brand name he is, King could see that no one really makes money writing horror stories. Edgar Allan Poe died a strangely mysterious death at forty without ever making a solid career out of his writings, and this was a man who was writing Sherlock Holmes stories before there was a Sherlock Holmes. H. P. Lovecraft, commonly cited as a best of the genre, would never thrive financially as a writer. King, himself, would perhaps grow to be the exception to this rule, but I think that what can be said about horror can be said about genre writing in general. Consider Philip K. Dick, a prolific skiffy novelist and short story writer who would hit it big posthumously.

So the other day I’m flipping through the erratically published Cemetery Dance Magazine, and decide to read the interview with Stephen Jones. When I first subscribed to CD for six issues, I had hopes of possibly writing a horror yarn of some sort, but as those dried up, the magazine’s aforementioned lack of timeliness in publishing also took some of the fun away. What I came away with, interestingly enough, was one author whose writings I considered my self quite fond of, by the name of Stephen Graham Jones. This was a man who seemed to actually understand horror and what it was supposed to do, where it succeeded, where it failed. I think it’s quite obvious then, that Stephen Jones is another horror character, but one with an even bigger reputation—Jones is an established British horror anthologist, someone I had heard of through his previous collaboration with Neil Gaiman.

The bone I have to pick with Mr. Jones is that he seems to blame the dwindling amount of book sales on a certain “sub-literacy” as he puts it in the article. This is just outright outrageous, since literacy rates have very little to do with why books don’t sell extremely well. What is funny here is that Jones says that the profession “writer” will become a “quaint historical curiosity” at some point in the future, and neglects to mention how this might actually occur.

While criticizing the illiterate masses for not reading his genre’s books, he maintains that newspapers have essentially dumbed themselves down to this level of sub-literacy and that the public’s attention has been fully stolen by celebrity pop culture.

The only point I really think needs to be made here is that there was a time when writing was considered something that one should not make a profession. Writers were treated as transgressors and disrespected because of their career status. Today the writer is much more respect than in the past, no matter how many people “read.” And to borrow something from Cory Doctorow, I believe, no one has stopped reading, something Jones seems to mesh over as somehow supporting his point, while he is actually stacking up contradictions. With the internet itself, it is quite true that we might lose some respect for the price of literature, since blogs and internet articles are commonly put out freely and supported by advertisements, making themselves quite often cheaper than even the “dumbed down newspapers” of which Jones speaks.

The fact of the matter is that some writers make it big and then become, once again, in the words of Stephen King, “a brand name.” King has tackled this concept well in both non-fiction and fiction, devoting enough side thoughts in Bag of Bones to the topic at hand. For the most part, then, other people cannot find much money from writing, over all. Bret Easton Ellis always appears to be tempting fate with his finances as he spends another seven years or so writing a novel, and even his story is a rare one of success.

For Jones to take such an issue as lack of readership and claim it for the horror genre and then on top of that for the contemporary time period is not only astounding, but plainly wrong. And his reasons for this drudging amount of readers are also easily seen through. It isn’t that people cannot read, but rather that reading becomes a part of school work for students. It is because kids are forced to read people like Aldous Huxley, rather than because they don’t read him, as Jones cites, that they grow up not wanting to reading.

It is due to the fact that students also do not enjoy doing arithmetic in their spare time or creating science projects during the summer, that very few people read an awful lot. What it comes down to is there are alternatives to reading a book: you can watch a tv show or a movie. But the one thing that our boy Stephen seems to have really forgotten is that these things have writers too.

And most people do a lot of reading online these days. Perhaps in short choppy news bites, but this cutting of news stories does not involve dumbing down, but rather cutting to facts and what people consider the main ideas of their article. Look, the world has really sped up since the invention of the automobile, and it isn’t going to slow down, so what people read might become bite sized, but to call these people sub-literate and uncaring towards actual events, is only to alienate your own consumer base, namely people who read.

What Jones really needs to learn is that evolution is a real thing and it exists outside of Darwin's area of study. Just because people who write novels may not get as great a paycheck as they once did, does not show any sort of death to the author, but really only a shift in the way things need to be sold. The entertainment industries are not going to be able to sell ideas to a public for much longer and need to learn some respect when it comes to the inevitable downfall of cover price. What this does not say is that the writer will cease to exist, but quite the opposite, in the brave, new world that you can just be able to see on our future's horizon, the writer is going to be anyone and everyone. As Miranda July might put it, me and you and everyone we know will be out there sharing opinions and ideas in the way that Socrates thought distasteful. Yeah, we're all going to be writers.

"Trading Places"

The biggest story in baseball for at least the next week I’d say is the trades made before the deadline of 4PM last Friday. The Pittsburgh Pirates butchered their line up in an attempt to show that they are set to start over in the next few years. This from a team that hasn’t had a winning season in more than the past decade and a half, and if you ask me, is going to go at least a score of years before they can win 82 games in a year. As a fan of the former Tampa Bay Devil Rays, I guess I can’t help but push the story of how bad Pittsburgh teams of late have been, their tale offers some sort of excuse as to the Devil Rays own horrid beginnings, a team who themselves had not won more than seventy games in a year until they took “Devil” out of their name and powered their way into the World Series last year. But enough has obviously been written about Tampa’s Cinderella Season in 2008, I should get back to the trading deadline.

One guy who has really gotten around in the past two weeks began his routes with the above mentioned infamous Pirates playing along with his brother as both a respected hitter and a strong first baseman. Adam LaRoche has to have some mixed feelings over his recent road trip from Pennsylvania into Massachusetts and then down south to Georgia. The interesting thing with this story, in my opinion, is just that LaRoche has different reasons to be at any of these three teams. In Pittsburgh, as a part of a losing line-up, he at least got to play along with his brother Andy, and they’ve helped the team compile the most Baseball Tonight “Web Gems” this season so far. As for Boston, I think any player would enjoy playing for the team that I’d still pick as the best in the AL East and the likeliest to win that division. Even though I’m probably in the minority in thinking Boston will finish ahead of the Yankees at the end of the year, they are the leading team for the AL Wild Card, and LaRoche would have to be psyched to have a chance at October baseball, wouldn’t he? But the funny thing is that he was with Boston for about a week before he got traded to Atlanta. The Braves, in a way, for LaRoche have to be homecoming of sorts, since he played his first three major league seasons in Atlanta, but this has to be a step down from the Red Sox.

Moving on from Pittsburgh, the inevitable segue has to be made to the Indians, who’ve also mined the cores of their line-up this year. Cliff Lee, last year’s AL Cy Young winner has been sent to the Phillies, which makes it back to back years that Cleveland has not only had that particular award winner, but has dealt him to the National League. Now Cleveland has been taking a lot of heat for this trade in particular, which few say seemed like an even swap, but I’m willing to give that some time. What is amazing though, is Lee’s debut in Philadelphia, where he pitched a complete game and got the 5-1 win. In my opinion, people saying that the Phillies have all but clinched the NL Pennant are definitely early in their predictions, but this is a major addition for the defending MLB champs. Philadelphia might be almost assured their division title with Lee in their rotation, but the Dodgers have to be considered a potential roadblock in the post season as well as whoever wins the NL Central, since the tight battle there will probably force some really strong baseball in the last sixty games (and even the Giants, my personal pick for NL Wild Card, and the team I’d most like to see the NL Pennant).

Following the movement of Lee, Cleveland gave up Victor Martínez to the Boston Red Sox in other trade that I see as more even sided. Justin Masterson, a respected right-handed relief pitcher who has made some starts in place of “Dice-K” Matsuzaka. Masterson’s impact in Cleveland is yet to be seen, but what I really think is interesting is that the Red Sox are so involved in these trading moves. Both the Red Sox and the Yankees of this year (and to be frank, of most years) have been listed consistently as the two best teams of the American League. Yet, my team, the pesky Tampa Bay Rays, are the team to be almost uninvolved in the trading game. I mean, the Red Sox picked up Victor, a catcher/first baseman, while having a catcher already who is the team captain (Jason Varitek) and three different players who play first base either primarily or secondarily. They then traded newly acquired Adam LaRoche, a move that made sense because of his status as a first baseman, for Casey Kotchman, a move that made no sense, since he is also a player of the same position.

I guess the point I’m trying to make is that I support my home team for not dealing players willy nilly. Although Martínez is most definitely happy to be in Boston, with a team leaps and bounds above the basement dwelling Indians, he had hoped to be a franchise player, and to finish his career in the place it started. This is not a common mindset among baseball players these days, and even though it is refreshing to see it, it is also understandable that players have to see the game as a business, since it is their job. Regardless of this, however, the fans’ standpoint has to be to hold onto the players that they like to watch play. (In Tampa, the name that comes to mind is Edwin Jackson.) Many people have criticized the Rays for not making more moves on the trade market, but I for one am glad that they didn’t, since it would be difficult to see anyone go. Looking at sports as some sort of warless nationalism, it makes easy sense why fans would be attached to players to such an extent.

An idea I may get back to in a week or two connects around this idea that my team is good the way it is. I’ve heard critiques of lack of an “established closer,” but see J. P. Howell as a relief pitcher who is establishing himself in that role. Even Mariano Rivera didn’t begin pitching games in the ninth inning, and it just seems like the Rays’ way to grow a player for a position than go out and get one (perhaps a side effect of the not unlimited pay roll of the club, but also an ingrained part of the team’s cultural history). I really think that most baseball commentators are not as up on the game as they should be. Perhaps I am just an angry fan in this thought, but I think I can throw some evidence together to support my process.

As for now, I can’t much throw together grammatically correct sentences anymore, so I guess this’ll be the end of this one. Against the suggestions of Radiohead, this time I’m going to stop whispering before I start shouting.

"The Television Commercial"

I don’t mean to throw stones or to insult anyone specifically, but recent treatment of the television commercial has come across to me as quite stupid, indeed. A quick wikicheck* shows me that the commercial break traces its origins to the first televised commercial which occurred one month and sixty eight years ago during a baseball game. The four dollar watch ad was probably able to gather more service from its pure newness than from any actual thought process put into making their advertisement. However, Bulova appears to have made a solid commercial, in my opinion, ten seconds of a clock over a map of the US with accompanying voiceover spouting out what could be seen as the first television advertising catch phrase, “America runs on Bulova time.”

This is a satisfactory approach for any number of reasons really; the ad is short and to the point enough to possibly work itself into viewers’ heads, and many, seeing their old watches break or die in the coming months may have sought out Bulovas thinking that if the whole country was running on them, they might as well too. I’m fairly sure that in ’41 television was trusted much more commonly than it is today, and certain that the first advertisement these people had seen come out of their picture boxes would not be as distrusted as the masses that they must deal with nearly every program these days. So, congratulations to Bulova aside, I would like to trace the sides to my observance of the pure bush league approach taken from almost all sides in today’s television commercial culture.

Sure, some disparaging remarks are due the commercial sponsoring companies themselves, but first I think I need to blow off some steam towards the television stations themselves, namely Fox, and their recent attempt at metamorphosing television advertising. What I speak of directly here is the attempt with new shows Fringe and Doll House from last season to incorporate a “Remote Free TV” approach to programming. My main issue with Fox’s attempt here is plainly the destruction of an important element to television viewing, “the commercial break.”

What commercials have become, to some extent, is a time to get things done around the house, or to do your homework, or whatever else your mother tells you, it is an added element of control for the parent who gives their child the remote, the ability to say, “and I want you to get this done during the commercials.”

Now this isn’t to say that a shortened number of ads in an episode of some show is such a bad idea anyway, but rather that the whole concept of “Remote Free TV” is perhaps a last dying wish from the advertising world. The fact of the matter is, television commercials are going to have to be innovative enough to make people pay attention to them, and shortening ad breaks will do nothing for this. The rise of DVR use effectively crushes the television commercial, no matter how long each break is made.

No one is going to stop and sit through 90 seconds of ads when they don’t need to, but I don’t believe it’s such an absurd thing to see someone pause and watch a commercial they particularly enjoy, or that piques their interest for the first time. The point I’m trying to make is that the commercial break has found its way into our culture, just as television has so firmly put its hand around our lives, and for regular television channels to begin experimenting with this concept is a horrible idea, and one that ultimately benefits very few.

The idea of the commercial as enjoyable programming, skewed towards one product is perhaps the best way to approach the issue. Gatorade’s ads preceding their rebranding that were only asking the question of “What’s G?” were just blatantly useless, as far as any serious ad campaign goes. Spreading buzz really has no place in a thirty second ad. One should stick to humor for the most part, although innovation is always useful.

This is why people like the late Billy Mays and Vince Offer can make their sales pitches into straight commercials. Innovation works very well on television. We, the viewers, have grown skeptical of how truthful our picture boxes really are, but we’ve also grown more sure of the pioneering process. Often times, I’m sure, advertisements for new products leave people thinking, “why didn’t someone think of that before?,” and this works just as well as any humor in winning a viewer over to the advertisement’s sponsor. This concept has spun itself into new life, interestingly enough, with such things as American Inventor and Pitchmen. People like to see new inventions, creations, and ideas made manifest. I’m sure once and awhile even made those of us most skeptical of the worth of the human race**, proud of humanity.

For me, the ad campaign that tickles me the most is USA Network’s series of little interlocking tidbits tying different television series together into one close-knit family. This might just be my own fondness for inside jokes and reoccurring characters, but it is also a good way to make commercials entertaining. It is quite apparent that USA can be more involved with its original television series, because of its smaller network status, but it just seems obvious to me that new semi-canon segments outside of television shows, things like USA’s concept or simple minisodes are perhaps the best way to advertise for television programming.

And now that I’ve truly found myself to have my fill of this particular topic, and my butchery of typical informational journalism, I think I’m pretty much done here. I tag this as a rant as well as whatever else it is, because I’m speaking off the top of my head for the most part, and, in so doing, I’m sure, have devolved at least partially into a raving lunatic. So, if you have made your way all done this line of type to this sentence, than I both apologize and thank you for your effort.

Perhaps the best way to end this whole segment is to segue out on Radiohead lyrics, thusly adding my own little advertisement to this extended monologue…

I’m not here, this isn’t happening.


* A phrase I may have just coined that I intend to only mean checking Wikipedia for facts. Noteworthy in that it allows one to inform the reader that yes, this isn’t just made up, but no, the most suitable source for said information was probably not tapped.
** I’m thinking of Kurt Vonnegut, “Father Kurt,” according to Tabitha King.

"Forcing It (On Blogging)"

In baseball, you can force it on either side of the field. The pitcher who’s trying too hard to go for strike outs or the batter expanding his zone. I, obviously, don’t consider myself any form of an athlete, but I think there is equating to be done here.

Writing, to me, is an insubstantial thing that nevertheless is either there or missing. It’s something I can do at times and feel particularly well about it, but it is also so often a steep incline, or not even that, but a wall. You look up and search for the rope to help you climb and all too much of the time it seems like there’s nothing there, and you’re doing all you can do by just sizing up the wall.

If I remember correctly, Palahniuk’s idea to fixing this is to just give yourself an hour and stare at the wall. I guess this is perhaps where the idea of the muse enters the equation, the person who tosses you down your rope or step ladder, or whatever it is that flies down on its wings and picks you up. I understand that one of the best learning mechanisms possible is the old stand-by of “practice makes perfect,” but it just seems like so much of the time that I try to write, I only feel like I’m forcing it. Elvis has left the building, and here I am trying to do the encore.

Sometimes it appears to me to be some sort of horrible grueling process, but perhaps I should just look at it from another perspective. Vonnegut stressed that practicing an art was damn nearly a necessity, something to be supported at all costs, with the actual benefit of such not being the product, but the act itself. Just general “journey more important than destination” thought process there, but the thing with Kurt was that even if you disagreed with him it was hard not to see him as the right one in the debate.

If you turn the page that way, you suddenly have to consider the more obstacles the better, since it no longer matters what shape you are in when you get out of the course, or what sort of time record you can put down. Coupling this with an idea that I firmly do believe (that writing more causes one to write better), you have to support forcing it to some extent.

I think the main issue I have with blogging is similar to the one I’ve always had with keeping journals. A friend once told me that I wasn’t very good at describing things and I believe myself to be a vague writer, as if each story, were they to be imagined as films, were taped with the camera in semi-focus and plenty of smog around the corners. Every now and then some of the machinery in the background becoming visible.

What this led to in journals were extended rants and explanations of thought processes, which did not really justify themselves as ideas to be shared. I’ve never lived an interesting life, in my opinion, and moving away from things that have happened to me, we’re left with what I think about things that happen to other people or in other places and at least in journals the eventual petering out of entries can be blamed on humility, not being overly supportive of “me writing about me.” I don’t write for a reader, but I do try to consider the concept of the reader—meaning that I try to justify things as worthy of someone’s time. I think both Vonnegut and Chabon have touched on that.

When I blog, I think I’ve lost that excuse, if I want to be truthful at all. I think the reason I have trouble talking about myself on the web because it loses even the superficial security of a book that one gets from writing a journal. I believe that my fear of passing my ideas around stems from a multi-faceted flower—one side being that I like to keep as much of the mask of anonymity as I can and another being that I fear the chances that my ideas may be mocked, crushed, and that I might be hurt in some way.

I think it is apparent, then, that I find myself with a weighing of the scales involved. The benefits of writing can only be multiplied by way of an audience seeing a completed work, but I have to see those benefits as worth it in the long run. And I think that right now the scales are turning that way.

The best way to attempt to do this whole “practice” thing as far as I can tell, is to set a near impossible goal for oneself and then even when that goal isn’t reached, accomplishments have been made. (The cliché, “Aim for the moon, if you don’t reach it, you are still among the stars.”) For me, at least, that was what National Novel Writing Month was really about.

Writing 50,000 words of a comprehendible novel in thirty days is, for me at this time, impossible. But the experience was over all quite worth it. It showed that I could come damn close to reaching that sort of production, even if quality is necessarily sacrificed (“he was a prolific author, you have to give him that,” they said at his funeral).

The one thing I perhaps did not expect to gain from my NaNoWriMo attempt was the salvageable ruins of different little stories or ideas or what have you. I like to think of them as seeds, something I think I’m stealing from Stephen King, but the right moniker as far as I’m concerned. Little tiny things that can grow in a wide variety of different directions.

The new impossible goal is to write a bit less, but on many more topics. The whole “blog entry a day” thing seems to have taken off, or did, I may have missed the fad, but I’m not doing it to look cool, since I’m pretty sure that isn’t possible. So, right now, the idea is 1,000+ words per entry (a reason in itself for the “uncoolness”), for every day of August as well as today, the last day of July.

I don’t think I can do it, but that is somewhat the point here. And I want to have a little bit of fun with it, so I plan on doing a little bit of theme running and alliteration throughout the month.

I’m thinking about it like that pitcher before every inning throwing all his pitches out just to make sure he has them there in the eight before he faces another hitter or the batter who is going all out in the minor leagues to see if his injury is completely gone or not.

And since my writing production has been very much a mixed bag, extremely inconsistent, I think some sort of schedule will work well for me at the moment. As an added bonus [sarky] Oh, lucky you [/sarky], I may put up little free verse poems now and then, along with more substantial posts.

So now, because I’m finding myself too often searching for the right word to continue with, and my notifications have been made, I bid you adieu, sorry for boring you.

History

"I think one of the biggest mistakes we're making, second only to being people, has to do with what time really is." That's Vonnegut, a quote I first read in his A Man Without a Country, which changed my mind in some ways more than any other writer has (except maybe Bret Easton Ellis, but Vonnegut changed more than my literary mind, more than my style as a writer).

I lead with this quote because it seems to be one of the things chiefly associated with Kurt that he could write lines that just made too much sense and that seemed like some of the simplest structures and bases, and I can't really construct my own idea, now that I've read that line, without just pilfering it. This makes me think of a Chabon story from his first collection, A Model World and Other Stories, which might or might not be the eponymous story, for my memory of title is vague, but which deals with a character who, in finding a book written on the very subject of which he has planned to write a paper, is overcome by an inclination to plagiarism that all but forces him to copy the tome. I must admit, the limited amount of the story that I can recall truly bothers me, but I think my point is evident.

In Vonnegut's posthumous collections, Armageddon in Retrospect, his son, Mark, closes the preface with a caution for the readers that if we should not be intrigued by the subject matter, we should look through such to the structure, wording, and phraseology given to us by Father Kurt (which I might have mentioned before as Tabitha King's pet name for Vonnegut). And, as I see now how much I've written without approaching my actual point, I've made a sort of personal discovery, a link back into my own past, or history, as the title of this entry might suggest.

I do not use the term "history" here literally, because the point I have realized deals with my parents, both very much alive, but, in a fashion, images of my past, just as any of my ancestors could be considered stepping stones on the way to me in the family tree (and I do not mean this vainly, for anyone, it is true). What I mean to say is that my long-windedness is perhaps explained by who my parents are, in a way. I have a mother who cannot seem to begin mid-story and must restart from the beginning in many times in most every conversation, and although this is no major flaw, it results in something similar to this, a lot of "mass" used and little "information" exchanged. My father, then, added into this equation could account for this emphasis on the written word, for, himself not a writer (although, his father, my grandfather to some extent was, my grandfather to some extent was everything), is most definitely a reader, and I would wager has read a few thousand books in his day (not actually hyperbole, if we count rereadings of the same book as multiples), and could extend to me such an impulsion towards written language. I do belittle my mother for her inability to skip over what has already been told, but I find now that perhaps it is my same trouble here, for I am unable to cut this and get to the point of this struggle, what I truly wanted to say here.

Then again, all that above could just be some form of rationalization, an explanation for why my "important point" to make will amount to little more than a simple paragraph, and since I write directly from my mind much more often than not, I am actually unsure how much of a point it is that I have to make, how many words or sentences it will amount to.

But now that I have explained why it is that I have alluded to Mr. KVJ, I will amend his quote to suit my purposes, for the true point here was to say that I think one of the biggest mistakes we're making, second only to being people, has to do with what history really is, and what we have envisioned it as. What history is is a construct, an ability for us to look back and say that "this is what happened" back then. What we try to say it is is truth, which is very far from the mark.

It might be due to my current reading of Robertson Davies's pseudo-memoir through the eyes of Dunstan Ramsay, Fifth Business, but the way I have recently grown to consider history is as a concept very much like a fiction, where, as the saying goes, the writers are the winners. This, however is not the exact point I wish to make. What I want to say has more to do with happenstance, with occurence, than with the heroes involved.

See, what humanity seems to be at least partially about is accepting and casting blame, which is something I find it difficult to write about myself, and it has stalled a novel I'm working on. At the end of the first part, I need the nameless narrator to be able to explain how all the people who he has blamed all through the book so far are not the sole perpetrators in ruining the life that he is now attempting to run away from. Perhaps it is because the narrator, an unnamed, faceless character, is too much me, or, in a paradoxical way that I must attribute to Aaron McMullan, not enough me, that I cannot seem to account for his actions myself, as the writer, and thus cannot find them in my mind to write.

I doubt any of this is making sense, but what my original idea was, was that people of the past, people like Hitler, people like Stalin, what is to say that they weren't just examples of their era? I don't mean to lessen their terrors, only increase our own, for, truly, antisemitism in Germany extended outside of Adolf's head, went back in its own ways to Christian roots in the works of Martin Luther and the one-sidedness of the Catholic Church during the Middle Ages and Stalin was an incredibly complex and horrible man, but he was also faced with a complicated and terrifying problem. What Stalin did is horrifying, but is it inhuman? I think we try to think that way. What history for us seems to be about is creating villains and while both mentioned here are truly evil characters, my point is that there were plenty of other Germans who could have been Hitlers in that situation, and, in place of Stalin, with all the power provided to said replacement, I find it difficult to see the story playing differently. Stalin, himself, is the example of what I believe we do with our history, he moved from person to person, group to group, finding someone to blame for his problems, for his country's problems.

What really troubles me about this is that I believe we actually need to be able to take the blame for what has come to happen, for what we've done as a people in the past, and we don't seem to want to do that. We want to blame our villains, our Hitlers and Stalins, and we want to say, "Look, this was a good war, or a just war. At least it was necessary."

And, even though there's a KKK today, it wasn't that long ago that America was a racist nation. In Spain, just over a generation ago, Franco was still in power, the country was still as locked down as it could possibly be. I guess I really have no reason to talk about these things, since I'm no historian, but what I'm really afraid of is that in the future, when we've passed by our current prejudices, when we look back, I'm afraid that then we're going to have to find someone to blame.

And it seems to be in this way, by saying, look it's these people, it was this guy who did this, it by these ways of blaming that we have been able to justify not accepting everyone as a whole. Because, in this way we can blame others for not doing so, and we can thusly not feel bad ourselves. And, as a member of most majorities, and, as a man on top of that, I don't have anything to gain by this, but it does seem to be a problem.

And, with that, I bid you adieu, sorry for boring you.

Fringe

You can't help but compare Fringe to The X-Files, and now it has become very apparent that they are even going to be patterned in similar fashion. After last week's (yes I'm going to say it) mythology episode, this week was easily monster of the week.

The funny thing is that, no matter what Fringe gets right, there are a few things that it gets horribly wrong. In last week's episode we have Agent Dunham, like some new age James Bond with all her female helplessness, asking a captor for a drink of water, and then asking him to unrestrain her so that she may drink it.

I mean, seriously, this is worse than blatant. You make jokes about it before it even happens, assuming that they wouldn't write off the whole ease of her escape as "finding an idiot to unlock her and let her escape." This was what bothered me with Valkyrie, it seemed that no matter who Tom Cruise talked to, he couldn't find someone who would actually call Hitler up and say, "Man, they're planning to kill you." Where that film played off Nazis as just misunderstood heroes working under a monster, Fringe has a way of playing off your criminals as, well, idiots.

How does Dunham discover who it is that captured her? The man works with her at the FBI and he has a spot on his shoe. A SPOT! Something he didn't clean off in the morning, by coincidences that Dickens would feel bad about reading, leads her to coming up with her big breakthrough idea. Look, at least Greg House has conversations with people before he puts 2 and 2 together and it comes back as 4 instead of 22. What I'm trying to say is, in one episode, both a henchman falls for the oldest trick in the book, and an apparent mastermind neglects his own hygiene to the extent that his mask is useless.

My father watched this show and said it reminded him of Dr. Who and the bad thing is that this show isn't low budget at all, they just couldn't write any other way of escaping, any other way of figuring it all out. It's getting to be quite sad now, because this was really where The X-Files excelled, at least for someone like me. Even the mythology episodes post-Duchovny that were annoyingly all about chasing Mulder, it seemed like the people who were making the show at least knew what they were doing.

So hey, maybe I'm being judgmental, maybe this is why a show like Lost (that I haven't seen) is so acclaimed, this new form of "Hey, it looks like we don't get it either" way of making shows doesn't really do it for me, though. The main problem here is that Fringe could be a really good show, but it's not. When trying for some kind of science realism, which is an apparent shift of focus from something like The X-Files, please don't show me some kind of cheap fake thrill as a hand coming out of a computer screen, even if you are going to pass it off as a hallucination. I can't get rid of the feeling that I'm watching a B movie that's trying to be bad.

And you know the whole Scully-Mulder ambigiuty? Yeah, it's back, in a lesser way, but an even more dated way now. I'm tired of any sort of running serial that treats character relationships statically. One of the reasons I've grown to despise certain aspects of House, the main reason I really enjoyed season three of Dexter til near the end. I understand that it's hard to segment off a couple on a show and then have them break up (something that may or may not have happened on Bones which I've seen maybe an episode and a half of), but shows need to learn that any sort of staticness, predictability not played for comic appeal begins to draw on a show.

It also seems like there are enough scary things in our world to play with, rather than Fringe needing to revert to time machines (actually brilliantly done in the film Primer), huge flu viruses, and all sorts of seriously fake sounding things. The theme given by Peter Bishop in the last episode, about how all of this is real and we just don't know about it, is the kind of thing that made Burn After Reading a comedy, and just makes this show appear like it's trying too hard. Do you remember Jurrasic Park? (I need to read the book one of these days.) What was the reveal in Jurassic Park? That the DNA they used to fill in the dinos was from frogs that changed gender when necessary. Even if not of word of that was true, it made sense. The character of Walter Bishop and all these stories he has of all these great scientific things he does, well, they're running thinner each time, and I'm taking them with so many grains of salt, that I'm not even going to drink that glass of water, since it deserves to be in the Atlantic.

The goal of the show does seem to be this sort of "Look at what's going on in the world that you'll never know about," but at this it fails completely, because you can never watch it without at least a small shred of disbelief, and with the number of times I've laughed at it as of late, I'm not sure I can compare it to The Unborn, but it has the same problem. It wants to be good, it wants to work, it really does, and you have to give it that, but...

If anyone out there likes Lie to Me, is actually making an effort to watch Lie to Me, then I'm sorry, but a show like that, that basically reduces every lie ever told to being so blatant as to making an overly visible twitch or a smile necessary, is a foil to the reason something like Fringe doesn't work. It's the uncanny valley (something I actually agree with Freud about), because the show tries so hard to maintain this reality and then place it's irreality underneath, that it fails, while so many other shows aren't even going for real these days, granted, they just aren't trying hard.

But the worst part of all this is that Fringe is promising. It's actually worthy enough to DVR. (Which is a whole new endeavor in itself because of this new way of commercials that Fox has, where they're going to cut to about 5 minutes or something like that of ads per show. What no one notices is that commercials are such a reality of life for people without a DVR, that they've learned to do things during the breaks, and this is only breaking a relatively recent social construct, plus, people who have a DVR aren't going to watch commercial breaks, "because they're shorter.) Joshua Jackson only makes me think of Pacey every now and then, and has now become, comically, the man you go to when you need something done illegally. And it's the kind of show that gets to the point where you say "one more episode" after each one.

So, I don't really know what to say about it, except that I'm liking Leverage better, but perhaps, like Levi Weaver, "I’ve always been better at writing with a bit of vitriol," so have as much to say about it. I just feel that Fringe could have so much going for it, and more than enough to make a good show has been squandered.

But then again, on the topic and yet irrelevant, is Lucas Douglas seriously getting his own show? FTW.

People have been asking me what I read lately...

...or maybe I just have the illusion that that is happening. Whichever, the fact still remains that I don't really know anymore. I've been going after books based on the superficial--title, author, who the author knows, relationships between authors (i. e. Bret Easton Ellis leading me to reading McInerney's Bright Lights, Big City)--and the other day, when Welcome to the Monkey House was not at the bookstore, I found myself wandering shelves looking for a collection of short stories that could lead me to some sort of reasonable pastiche for the novel I'm trying to write (it's still coming along rather nicely in my head, but is stuttering on the computer screen, thanks for asking). It came down to Denis Johnson's Jesus' Son or Sherman Alexie's The Toughest Indian in the World, of which I picked the latter because it was longer, the same price, a trade paperback, rather than an MMP, and, partially because the grammar of Johnson's book still bothers me.

All of these somewhat stupid things flow through my head a bit too much, methinks. The blogs I'm reading are depressing me, because they all seem to tell so much more of a story than I've ever felt I've had to give. I don't really know the first time I started writing, or the first time I started telling stories, but I do know that it had nothing to do with my life, because I find myself to be quite boring.

So now I'm reading Chabon's A Model World and Other Stories and the aforementioned book by Sherman Alexie. Both remind me of the benefits of reading the short story, a style of writing that according to most everyone you ask, is becoming a commodity. (Even if the only person I can think of right now who has commonly brought this up is Stephen King.) Basically I've been reading straight first person as of late, even something like The Unbearable Lightness of Being with its ever present speaker, but have been avoiding books like The Delivery Man or The King of Methlehem, which are both, I believe, third person. I'm not exactly sure why I've been doing this, it's not like I dislike the construct of an omniscient narrator, but it has definitely become a conscious effort on my part. So, with a collection, I can shift back and forth, and have done so in the first three stories I've read of books. I need to get back to Paycheck and Other Stories, the first of the complete short stories of PKD, just so I can keep up my genre feelings, since my writing has been getting progressively more and more mainstream, which is not bad, but just unexpected, considering who I think I am.

I've also been drawing possibly random connections as of late: the whole time I was reading Lunar Park, I was thinking, "Ha! This is like Christine," and I don't know if that makes any real sense, even though "haunted" cars do play moderate roles in both. I've already spoken of the similarities I found between the first Milan Kundera book I'd ever read and last year's Pulitzer winner, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao.

Oddly enough, I picked up The Road because it was like six bucks for the MMP (twice as long and half the price of Jesus' Son) at Wal-Mart of all places, so, even though I haven't made any headway through The Orchard Keeper, I'll be reading more Cormac McCarthy soon. Thinking, if I wait on getting back to my first Library of America book, Philip Roth's Novels and Stories 1959-1962, pick up some Delillo and Pynchon (both of which I'll be reading someday, I'm sure), I'll be reading Harold Bloom's favorite living quartet, even though I don't care for anything Bloom says, just because, for me, he is the perfect example of the stuck-up literary critic.

The only problem with this whole goal of mine, when it comes to writing this novel I want to write, is that I've never really done any half-good pastiche, except for, perhaps three pages from the book I wrote in November which was pretty damn close to me just stealing from Easton Ellis's Glamorama. I've written one of the shorts for the book now, but I don't really know if it fits the sort of thing I've been going for. It's called "The Man Who Was Forgot," and is something I've been working on for a long time really (trying to write a story with that title), and an idea that my father's only response to was, "But, that's like, grammatically wrong, right?"

So, it feels good to have written that finally, fully, beginning-middle-end, something I've been doing a helluva lot more lately than ever before, and must be some form of a step up. But that's about it, I guess, thinking I really, really need to read The Great Gatsby, which I've been turning into a myth of comparison in my mind, and is probably nothing, absolutely nothing, like I'm expecting it to be.

And I guess the main problem I have with this whole blog writing thing is the same problem I have with writing anything that isn't pretty much straight fiction. I usually just go with what comes into my mind, what words appear in my head, and that leads me down odd pathways, and useless corridors, and I find myself wondering what I'm even trying to talk about anymore. But feeling better than that last sentence sounds right now.