Not that Iām an expert in the genre, but...
So the Bursteins were kind enough to loan us the DVDs of the first Torchwood season, and we’re about halfway through them, and I have to ask:
What is the point of writing Jack/Ianto fanfic? It seems somehow…unsporting.
Dept. of poorly named consumer goods
This country needs more children’s toys that help our young ones respect and empathize with people who have severe mobility impairments. I am disappointed to report that the Dora the Explorer Lil’ Quad is not such a toy.
Another way the Internet brings people together
There’s a song by the Bobs called Naming the Band, in which the narrator, an aspiring heavy-metal musician, laments that “names with meaning and attitude aren’t easy to find”. Well, now they are.
via Hacker News
Who is this God person anyway?
Thanks to Michael and Nomi, Jen and I got to see the PBS four-hour special on the Mormons. It was a fascinating documentary, but I found one omission curious: there was almost nothing about the church’s theology.
Compared with most other sects that call themselves Christian, the Mormons have (at least) two striking differences in their conception of the divine. One is that they see God the Father, Jesus, and the Holy Ghost as three separate individuals, rather than three persons sharing a single divine essence. Another is that the belief ××“× that God was once a person and that a good Mormon may get his (or her?) own world to rule as a god in the afterlife: former LDS president Lorenzo Snow summarized this principle by saying “As man is God once was, and as God is man may become”. (Cf. D&C 132:20.) In other words, Mormons are polytheists.
The documentary only refers to this belief elliptically and in passing, but I think it sheds an important light on the Mormon persecutions of the early nineteenth century (which precede Mormon polygamy by at least a decade). A number of other American Christian sects (e.g., the churches of Christ, the Disciples of Christ, and the Seventh-Day Adventists) were also inspired by the “Second Great Awakening” of 1800–1830, but they did not get such a violent reaction from the mainstream. Even the Oneida Community, whose doctrine of “complex marriage” made Mormon polygamy look downright prudish, did not face the same degree of persecution.
I was reminded of Devil’s Playground, a documentary on the Amish that I saw a while back, because in that film, too, the doctrinal differences between the Amish and other Christian sects were glossed over. One of the Amish boys interviewed mentioned in passing that attending a Baptist church service was one of the “bad” things that Amish teenagers might indulge in during their rumspringa. One of the girls eventually decided not to join the Amish church and decided to go to college instead—to a sectarian Christian college. But these subjects’ thoughts on the difference between the Amish faith and other forms of Christianity were not explored any further.
Back when I was doing my bachelor’s thesis, one of my advisors—Lisa Rofel, an anthropology professor—warned me that I had to make sure to describe my subjects from “the native’s point of view”. In that respect, I fear that both of these documentaries fell a little short. To truly understand an exotic religious group (or interactions between several exotic religious groups), it helps to understand the aspects of their beliefs and practices that are most important to them, and not simply the ones that are most important to the stereotypical liberal documentary-watcher.
Selling little plastic shovels to the Gold Rush prospectors
I have to admire the chutzpah of whoever conceived of this publication.
I'd be happy to live anywhere else
Yesterday's Globe had an article (link will probably rot tomorrow) about how Allston, Massachusetts has been honored by inclusion in The Absolutely Worst Places To Live In America. The book—whose author, a Boston College alumnus, can speak of Allston from personal experience—refers to my neighboring neighborhood as “a melting pot of upper-middle-class white kids eager to experience a brief taste of rebellious semiurban squalor” full of “faux Irish pubs, garbage, vomiting in the shrubbery, drunken brawling, late night/early morning car alarms”.
This reminded me of the first two years of my marriage, when we lived in a basement apartment at the corner of Allston and Kelton streets. One morning we woke up to find a pool of vomit on the path leading to our door; judging from the residue along the outer wall and windowsills, it had come from someone living four stories up. Unfortunately, I was unable to rouse the perpetrator by pounding on his back door (at 10:00 a.m. on a Sunday morning), so I left a note of complaint with the landlord, complete with a diagram of the splatter marks. (To be fair, the landlord was letting us have the apartment at below market value, which, considering what market value was back then, was a sorely needed favor.)
I guess if you can make it there, you’ll make it anywhere.
How the Internet is transforming commerce, part DCCCLXXVII
(Let’s see if I’m sufficiently recovered from chagim-plus-new-baby to get back to blogging…)
We’re trying to reintroduce the baby to bottle-feeding, and we were wondering if he’d be more likely to suck on a different kind of nipple. So I did an amazon.com search for “nipple” and this (warning: NVSFW) came up second in the results.
I am amused by the contrast between the “Product Description” section and the “Customers who bought this item also bought” section. Somebody should tell the vendor that there’s really no point to being coy about who their customers are.
Messianic murder
Murderer in the Mikdash is much, much better-written than Left Behind. If you only buy one murder mystery set in the Jewish messianic era, you must buy this one.
Umm.
Let me try that again.
If you want to write a novel that explores some society that your readers might not be familiar with, throw in a dead body. It’s a cheap trick, but it works: the reader’s primal motivation to see evil-doers brought to justice will keep them paying attention to the nuances of your world. Cases in point: The Caves of Steel, The Alienist, and Small Town.
Gidon Rothstein uses Murderer in the Mikdash to explore what life will be like for Jews in Israel in the Messianic era. The book follows the opinion that this era will not be characterized by overt and spectacular miracles, but merely (ha!) an end to other nations dominating Israel. Rothstein’s kingdom has a king (who never appears onstage and is hardly ever mentioned), a “Democrats Anonymous” for people still getting used to the new order, a Temple where priests perform sacrifices, and cities where manslaughterers can take refuge from their victims’ avengers. But it also has unhappy marriages, priests worried about the Temple’s financial solvency, corruption, racketeering, and, of course, murder. (Resurrection of the dead? Not yet, apparently.)
The book’s main character is an investigative reporter and a non-observant Jew, which gives the author an excuse to describe certain mitzvot, such as the cities of refuge, in some detail. Rothstein shows admirable restraint by only spelling out details of post-messianic society that are relevant to his plot, although I wish he’d found excuses to explain more. (How, for example—this is one of my wife’s pet peeves—will transit authorities change their ways to account for the laws of niddah?) By concentrating on the seamy side of post-messianic Israel, Rothstein prevents Murderer in the Mikdash from reading like a nineteenth-century utopian novel. The Israel he describes doesn’t look terribly attractive, until you compare it with the real Israel, the one with the Katyushas.
While portraying the Jewish messianic age in fiction is a new idea (at least, new to me), the book draws heavily on stock thriller elements: the investigative reporter, the villain whose minyansminions are everywhere, the incriminating document that everyone is looking for, and so forth. If Rothstein had managed to breathe a little more originality into his characters—to bring Rachel Tucker up to the level of Elijah Baley—I would be recommending this book to everyone, even those with no interest in the religious angle. As it is, I enjoyed the book, and I think it might do well as a movie for Israeli TV, but…well, if you like this kind of thing, it’s the kind of thing that you will like.
What is man, that thou art mindful of him?
While reading Self-Made Man, Norah Vincent’s story of spending a year and a half passing for male, I came across an analysis of how men in a bowling league she joined would try to help her with her game. She recounted how, as a female athlete, she got back-stabbing and catty remarks from other women; by contrast, the men in “Ned”’s league, even the men from opposing teams, kept trying to give “him” practical advice.
...[T]hey seemed to have a competitive stake in my doing well and helping me to do well, as if beating a man who wasn’t at his best wasn’t satisfying. They wanted you to be good and then they wanted to beat you on their own merits.
When I first read that, I thought, Oh, that’s an interesting insight into the difference between men and women. But the next day, mulling over what I had read, I realized that it had no connection to my own experience as a man dealing with other men. OK, I’ve never belonged to an athletic league, but I’ve been a member of a writers’ workshop; I’ve volunteered for various political organizations; I was a gabbai and board member at a synagogue. When it comes to helping me be a more competent member of these organizations (or not), I don’t notice a difference between how my male and female co-volunteers have treated me. Certainly I don’t see the drastic contrast that Vincent saw between one group of working-class middle-aged men at a bowling alley and another group of upper-class teenage girls at a tennis camp. Maybe this attitude is confined to all-male sports teams—but I know I’m not the only guy who avoids team sports.
And that, in a nutshell, is my reaction to Self-Made Man. Based on her experience among men in some of the most stereotypically male environments (e.g., a bowling league, a Catholic monastery, and a Glengarry Glen Ross—style sales job), she has drawn sweeping conclusions about The Inner Lives of Men, many of whom don’t want to be in such environments. (League bowling is so unpopular these days that a book on the decline of American communities uses it as a case in point. The Catholic Church in America is having trouble finding young men willing to become parish priests, let alone monks. The sales job that Vincent took had such a high turnover that managers were constantly interviewing new candidates.)
One notable weakness of Vincent’s research is her lack of investigation into how men behave and feel as husbands. She observes them in all-male environments where they are taking a recess from their marriages, so to speak (such as the bowling league), or not married at all (such as the monastery). The closest she comes to a mixed environment is when she investigates the heterosexual dating scene. When she remarks on how reluctant men are to share their emotions, and speculates on how this may be wounding them psychologically, I want to shout at her through the page: “Well, duh! Men are reluctant to share their emotions with other men. They depend on the women they’re intimate with for emotional support. That’s why, for example, men are more likely than women to get depressed following a divorce!”
Given how often men and women see one another as members of an alien species, it’s nice to have books that help people of one gender understand the feelings of the other. But the information conveyed by this book only describes a part of the male population—how large a part, I don’t know—and I worry about female readers who apply it to the rest of the gender.
There. Now I’ve shared my feelings.
A school for scandalously bad writing
Every once in a while, a writer from outside the SF community gets touched by our peculiar muse, and produces an excellent work that is recognizably SF, or at least something damn close to it. Books like this make the true believers grind their teeth and mutter “if only SF wasn’t considered a subliterary genre, then books like this would be published as SF, and people who liked them would actually deign to consider reading other SF books.”
Then, every once in a while, we encounter books like Prodigy, which do not bear the imprint of any SF publishing house, and thank God and Campbell for that. This tale, by a man who was “kicked out of several prep schools”, is about the prep school of the future: Stansbury, which charges $500K tuition (in 2036 dollars) to cultivate young minds using nonunion labor, cutting-edge drugs, and a rigorous educational program, thus turning out hordes of young men and women ready to fight aliens become leaders of science, industry, and athletics. The murder-mystery-cum-thriller plot is nothing special; this book is distinguished by such thrilling flights of speculation as:
The rubber-Teflon blend in the soles of Smith’s work boots…gripped the slick pavement as he pivoted into an alley off 3rd Street on Avenue R.
Wow, it’s a good thing the sneaker companies of the future thought to mix rubber with the Teflon in their soles, so that the shoes could grip the pavement better.
The dopazone molecules transferred digitally from the site’s mainframe server to Cooley’s terminal by bouncing in between thirty-eight separate destinations, all of which were decoys designed to throw off Stansbury’s built-in security system…. The dopazone molecules rode the electric currents and shot through the wrist cuff, transferring past the skin and into his bloodstream.
I’ve heard of Internet addiction, but really...!
Nothing to see here for anyone with a passing knowledge of science fiction, except perhaps as an object lesson in How Not To. If you run into any non-fen who have read this book and actually liked it, please beg them to pick up some SF thriller by a writer who’s actually competent.
