Books:
The Sibyl in Her Grave by Sarah Caudwell
This is the last book in a loosely connected series of extremely stylistic and arch British locked-room epistolary mysteries (yeah, THAT genre again) but it serves as a summary for all of them. The books are basically elaborate logic puzzles circling around a group of 20-somethings and their extremely pompous and self-oblivious Oxford Don from back when they were all together in college. There’s an impossible-to-solve murder somewhere early on, and the professor and her ex-students (mostly lawyers) unravel what happened via thwarted communication - letters, faxes, telex (whatever that is and I’m too lazy to Google) - but really the fun is in the dry dry dry writing and the under (and sometimes over) current of polite but vicious contempt spouted by most of the characters. The books really don’t need to be read in order because - and this isn’t an insult but rather just the way the books are written - the characters, other that the Oxford prof, are somewhat interchangeable and while prior events are referenced in later books, spoilers aren’t really relevant because the books are about unpacking present-tense logic rather than some continuing story. The reason it doesn’t matter that the characters are interchangeable is also the reason you might hate these books: the style is very specific and the pleasure is in the writing more than in memorable characters or story. I loved all of her books and am sad the series is over (it’s over because she only wrote 4 books before she died), but because the style is so particular, I advise taking advantage of Amazon’s Look Inside feature before grabbing a copy because you may very well hate it and, for better or worse, the style never varies throughout the series; if you like starting at the beginning, the first one is called Thus Was Adonis Murdered and your feeling about that one will be your feeling about all of them.
The Future Is Yours by Dan Frey
So this is a not-sci-fi book that, like the children's book Billions for Boris, posits an ability to use technology to peer into the future - in this case some quantum machine that passes data from a year in the future - and the consequences. It's not told as SF but rather as the story of the two best-friend inventors (straight males with an undertone of fighting over the same woman which doesn't feel current let alone futuristic to this Janice), the invention and financing of the machine, and what happens when the future doesn't look so hot and they splinter with one wanting to end the company they formed and the other doing everything he can to keep it going. I finished, but it was not good. I mean, I couldn't really figure out what it was supposed to be about or what it was meant to say about, well, anything really. It's told as a stream of emails, texts, interviews, articles, and Congressional testimonies and while in some ways that choice kept it moving (you sure tapped the screen a lot due to all the single-line pages e.g. "Email From: blah blah blah" on its own page), I ultimately found it really distracting because the author made a choice to never identify who was speaking when there was dialogue (texts really), not even with a - let alone a " to distinguish where one speaker ended and another began, and everything kind of bled together making it all somewhat confusing. Additionally, the Congressional testimony, which formed a framework of the book, seemed to exist solely to set up the next section as opposed to being about anything in its own right. But really I could've lived with all that if the author had anything new or interesting to say about tampering with the future/time travel other than "don't" or had any nuance about people in tech other than people who dream of money=bad whereas spectrum-y, dream-y, care-y inventor geeks=good. The writing was facile, Andy Weir-ish, and I finished but I never really wanted to pick it up because there was just no story/ideas there. I’m pretty sure the only reason I didn’t DNF was because the chapters were so short that I could convince myself to read the next chapter before deciding whether or not to quit and that more or less got me to the end of the book. Meh, blah.
TV/Streaming:
Starstruck:
So what do you think about this concept for a show? A woman has a drunken hookup with a celebrity... only it turns out he wants her and she doesn't want him! See how everything just got turned on its head?!? Um, that's literally the whole show. All of it. It's a comedy, supposedly, in the (I think) Catastrophe vein (it should be so lucky!) but, at least as far as the 3/6 eps I watched before DNF'ing out of boredom goes, there's literally nothing there other than that non-concept. And I could live the non-concept if the writer - also the star - had bothered to give a single reason as to WHY she was rejecting him - other than that he's famous and isn't it super cool to be the one not into the famous person?!?! - or why he's into her (because sidebar her personality was insanely unappealing). Nothing. Zero. They meet, have sex, she figures out who he is the next morning, she leaves, he chases her. The end. That barely feels like the plot of a blowsy romance novel let alone a series. And while I realize that mass-media/movie star famous is different than the more niche/local fame of TikTok/Insta/Youtube/sport-star-from-sport-you’re-not-into/whevs, given that the opportunity for fame has drastically expanded over the last couple of decades, one would think a show made within the past few years which deals with celebrity would make use of that for the drama or at least acknowledge its existence. There was some kind of opportunity here to look at, in this romantic comedy setting, what, if anything, fame actually means like do we distinguish between fame and notoriety anymore? Fame and infamy? Fame for achieving something vs fame for concerted self-promotion? And what counts as “something” - certainly on Youtube, unboxing makeup kits and ASMR videos of long-nailed women slowly scratching their hair counts for quite a lot. Would the show have been more interesting with one of these sorts of celebrities as the famous one (given the caliber of the writing uh I’m guessing no but still)? In other words, if you’re going to do a show about a famous person with a non-famous person, you kind of have to look at what that means today and not in the OMG-it’s-George-Clooney ‘90s, don’t you? Well apparently not. Suckered by non-Janice reviews ONCE AGAIN! This show is awful and I don't understand why no one in the studio food chain (BBC in this case) read the scripts or, if they did and noticed (maybe they didn’t notice? shudder), didn’t say something to the writer. Sigh.
P-Valley (Season 1):
This series is, as with Sex Education, a really really good show saddled with a godawful innuendo-y title that completely undersells its quality. The show is set in a strip club in the Mississippi delta and is shockingly textured and entertaining, especially given that the title, and subject matter frankly, seems like it will offer so little beyond the cliche. But it’s actually really well done. I won’t spoiler because there’s, not a mystery exactly, but a new character who arrives in town and goes to work at the club and she has a past that gets doled out in bits. That character, who in certain ways I thought was a plot convenience, turned out not to be that at all as more of her past unfolded mostly in the final couple of episodes. Though it’s a character drama, there’s a real humor to the show, and there are other throughlines - a stripper trying to start her own business, a plot involving snaky local politics - and thematics around race, poverty, and gender woven organically into the series. I really expected zero from this show, and it wasn’t good because of my low expectations but rather because it was genuinely well written and well acted (with some good music to boot). I’d say, in some ways, it most reminded me of Friday Night Lights only with strippers not football players and, instead of Coach, a big drag queen named Uncle Clifford. The plotting was good, characters interesting, it had some unexpected reveals, and I was thoroughly engaged through the first season and will def be coming back for the second (knock wood there is one).
Movies:
Iron Man 2 (Marvel Universe #3) - America's favorite billionaire pro-masker (well, his own at any rate) is back to save us all, this time, like a lost Koch brother, standing up to the gubernment by refusing to hand over his Iron Man tech, which one could view as a metaphor for either staunch individualism in the face of a government taking or the equivalent of refusing to repatriate offshore funds in order to avoid paying your fair share of taxes depending on your political bent. To make matters worse, his own Iron Man heart, the one that made him care so much in the first movie that he was compelled to destroy a city and kill thousands for the greater good of his shareholders, is causing his demise. As with any CEO dying because the machinery they used to replace their metaphoric/actual heart is releasing a poison that's killing him/her/them, he behaves like a post-COVID genZer by quitting corporate life - only without tweeting about it - and, even more of an American tragedy, leaving his company at risk of making less of a return, though he tries to mitigate that by appointing Goop as CEO. Despairing and having given up hope, he - and I’m sure this made total sense to the person who wrote it - enters a race in the Monaco Grand Prix at which point his nemesis, Mickey Rourke, whose relationship to the entire proceedings remained unclear to gummy-brain throughout, shows up dressed as a leather dom and tries whipping him to death (again, I’m sure it all made sense on the page). This serves to drive Iron Man further into depression and forces him to finally face down his real heart poison: daddy. As it turns out, while daddy never told him he loved him, he did leave him a fat clue in the post-credits sequence (or somesuch) of a home movie about how to power his Nascar/Grand Prix-loving megaheart without killing himself all of which is the leadup to the landscape-flattening, innocent-victim-murdering battle - with Mickey Rourke this time - that ends all of these films or at least the three I've watched so far.
Okay so that’s the plot. And now we need to discuss what this movie is so clearly about, so so clearly. Whose plot does this sound like to you?
Person, who grew up with inherited wealth but with painful daddy issues, takes Something that makes them feel powerful, invincible, loved by everyone while simultaneously being cocooned in a thick numbing shell that enables them to feel absolutely nothing and in which they feel completely safe. They take that Something all the time, 24/7, only one day they find out the unfortunate truth that that Something is actually killing them, poisoning them in fact, and that they are now faced with the horrific choice that they either have to stop taking that Something - and no longer feel special and beloved by all but rather have their casing peeled away and forced to feel all the things that the Something was enabling them not to feel - or die; person then spirals into a depression mixed with some risky death-wish-type activities because they’re so angry and resentful at what their life has become that they think they would rather not live at all than give up the Something because, without that Something, they risk getting hurt just like daddy hurt them and with no Something to shield them from the pain; but as it turns out, daddy, even if he was cold and uncaring most of the time, was also super into Something - like father, like person! - and left person an even more amazing Something that daddy cooked up in the ‘70s, a different better Something, one infused with the essence of Daddy-Loved-Person-After-All-Didn’t-He? that will make person feel even more invincible, special, a savior, beloved by all and, most importantly, will also allow them to keep living life wrapped in that thick casing separating them from the rest of humanity and all feelings; person immediately goes out and destroys everything in their path, including another person seeking the same Something for similar reasons and who is thus deemed “the enemy”, to victoriously get that new even more amazing daddy-blessed Something and it feels so good and they’ll have it forever and they’ll never ever ever have to give it up and oh thank you daddy.
I mean… it’s not just me, right?
Anyhoo looking forward to the next one!
Hon, please keep writing about the Marvel universe. I avoid those movies like a Covid kiss, but I appreciate your heroic unpacking of them. One theme you haven’t touched on is the sad absence of eye-candy in that movie realm. At least the old comic books had men in tight-tights, offering us a soupçon of ass and front-bits, but these current 2020’s metal shell-suits make them all look like Michael Bay fighting machines and a girl has no place to go with her fantasies. Libido buzz-kill. Stan Lee & Co. should re-costume them along the lines of FIFA players, tight shorts, fitted tops, some muscled leg. Probably still not enough to lure me to the party, but it’s a start….