An Ontarian in Newfoundland

She turned me into a Newt! (I got better)

2012-01-24T07:57:00.001-03:30

To be clear, I do not think that Newt Gingrichstands a hope in hell of being nominated as the Republican candidate forpresident. There is simply way too much stacked against him: he has proved tobe an inept campaign manager, he can’t come close to matching Romney’s money,the Republican establishment loathes him, and (perhaps most important of all)South Carolina played too perfectly to Newt’s strengths in a way that is highlyunlikely to be repeated as the primary battle drags on.

My prediction: Newt rides the momentum of SCfor everything it’s worth, fighting until his last dollar is gone. Perhaps hewins another, perhaps he comes close; in either case, he deals irreparable damageto Romney. I have to wonder if the worst damage hasn’t already been done: threestates down, and the presumptive Republican candidate has won (then lost—the recountin Iowa went to Santorum) in a squeaker, won respectably in New Hampshire, andgot his ass handed to him in South Carolina. This could potentially go on for along time, and every primary and caucus that passes without Romney locking inthe nomination bleeds him more. It’s not like four years ago in the protractedbattle between Obama and Hilary—there, we had two strong candidates withdevoted and indeed worshipful followings, and whatever resentment might havelingered, there was never any question that the loser would get behind thewinner.

That isn’t a certainty here. Quite theopposite, actually. The antipathy to Romney is powerful, powerful enough toelevate wingnuts like Bachman, Cain, and Perry, a religious bigot likeSantorum, and … well, honestly, I don’t know how to classify Newt. All of theabove?

Mind you, I’m not totally counting out Newt.Just mostly. “Not a hope in hell” normally means no chance whatsoever, buthaving followed this carnival for what feels like ten years now, I don’t wantto commit myself to the reasonable prediction. If I was a betting man, I’d saythe good money’s on Romney … but I’d be really, really tempted to put a dollardown on Newt’s long odds. The old chestnut, “That’s so crazy, it might justwork!” needs a re-jigging here. The Republican base is so crazy, they justmight nominate Newt. How’s that?

For what it’s worth, I think an Obama-Gingrichshowdown is precisely what the Republicans need. Would I be utterly gleeful tosee Newt get destroyed by Obama? Yes. Would I be over the moon to watch theFOX/Limbaugh industrial-complex stymied? YES. A thousand times, yes. But I alsowant conservatism in the U.S. to return to its senses, for all our sakes. Ithink it needs its Goldwater moment again, to be so thoroughly destroyed thatit has no choice but to reject the Palin/Bachman/Santorum wing of the party, todiscredit the FOX contingent, and to embrace its intelligent spokespeople.

Of course, I say this knowing that aGingrich-Obama showdown holds a 1% chance of Newt winning. At which point,Newfoundland doesn’t feel far enough away and I might start looking forEnglish-language universities in Sweden.

And you thought "teabaggers" was bad ...

2012-01-23T10:56:00.000-03:30

Oh, Rick Santorum ... as of this moment, you are the #1 reason Jon Stewart has the easiest job in show business. Seriously.

Apparently, Santorum has just launched a new fundraising group (or PAC, or SuperPAC, I'm uncertain of the distinctions these days), named "Conservatives Unite Moneybomb."

Got that? Yes. He has in fact started an organization whose acronym is C.U.M. Which meant that this morning I was treated to this headline in Google Reader:

(Which would not have been quite as bad if I hadn't been drinking a slightly gelatinous breakfast smoothie. Blerg.)

Besides going down (heh) as the most inopportune acronym since Canada's right wring briefly united under the moniker Conservative Reform Alliance Party, it also reflects so well on Santorum. Or at least it does from my perspective. His unrelenting and frequently unhinged attacks on gay marriage, gay rights, and the LGBT community generally echo the unreconstructed racism of people like George Wallace railing against civil rights even as the tide of history swamped them. That's what Santorum has to look forward to, but with a particularly cruel twist. Dan Savage's revenge--making "Santorum" synonymous with, and I quote, "the frothy mixture of lube and fecal matter that is sometimes the by-product of anal sex," and making it the number one result when one Googles the name--has effectively made the former senator's very name a joke ... and which added a rather revolting double entendre during the Iowa Caucus, when pundits and commentators spoke of him "surging" in the polls.

The Conservatives Unite Moneybomb won't do nearly as much as Savage's savaging, but it has the added bonus of being self-inflicted. And the fact that America's most vocally anti-gay mainstream politician will go down as a footnote to history forever associated with bodily fluids and gay sex ... well, to quote Buffy Summers, as justice goes, it's not unpoetic.

The appeal of Downton Abbey

2012-01-19T08:09:00.001-03:30

We’re now three episodes into season two of Downton Abbey, and the show continues to enthrall and delight—a fact that has apparently flummoxed some commentators, not because they don’t like the series but because it seems odd that such a proper and mannered British period piece should find the audience(s) is has. What, it is asked, is the appeal?

The question seems to me at best ingenuous and at worst paternalistic, ignoring in the first case the fact that such stories have always had a broad appeal, and subtly suggesting in the second that if it doesn’t contain sensationalistic story and spectacle, contemporary audiences (especially non-English ones) won’t get it. Yes, the hidebound class system depicted in Downton is alien to contemporary social mores; and yes, the series proceeds at an appropriately stately pace, with little in the way of lascivious storylines (Mary’s near-affair with the Turkish diplomat being the exception, sort of), and much harrumphing among both upstairs and downstairs about tradition and custom and the difference in kind between the aristocracy and everyone else.

But to wonder why this all appeals to contemporary audiences doesn’t give enough credit to contemporary audiences, who know a good story well told when they see it. There was much the same sort of pondering during the Jane Austen renaissance in the mid-90s, starting with the Colin Firth Pride and Prejudice and continuing with the adaptations of Emma, Sense and Sensibility, Persuasion, and Mansfield Park (which, had a production of Northanger Abbey been done, would have run the gamut of Austen’s corpus). Why, everyone asked at the time, is Jane Austen so popular again?

Theories advanced at the time tended to focus on nostalgia, a wistful desire for the certainties of a stately and stable class system; Generation X (remember them?), stuck in their dead-end jobs and aimless lifestyles, thought longingly of the calm certainty of Mr. Darcy or Emma Woodhouse’s lives. The appeal of Downton Abbey, it has been suggested, lies in both the revisitation of Austen-esque manners, but also the social ferment underlying the action as WWI starts to show the fault lines in the British class system and heralds the slow decline of the British Empire. In a recession-stricken time, it has been suggested, the discomfiture of the aristocracy and the new possibilities for social mobility resonate with audiences angry at the predations of Wall Street.

None of which I disagree with—certainly the waxing and waning of Austen and the periodic prominence of such series as Upstairs, Downstairs, The Jewel in the Crown, and Downton Abbey reflect shifts in the popular imagination—but it does seem a little overblown to me. The better considerations I have read do get around to the more important question, “why now?” as opposed to just “why?” but then the appeal of Downton Abbey seems self-evident after watching just one episode … it is extremely well written, well acted, and well produced, and makes one want to know what happens next.

The unbearable cynicism of Mitt Romney

2012-01-12T12:26:00.000-03:30

There once was a time during this extended carnival of the Republican race for the nomination that Mitt Romney seemed like the one sane person in the asylum, and his inability to establish a commanding lead an indictment of the current state of the Republican base. Seriously: the best thing that can be said about the successive surges of the non-Romney candidates—Bachman, Perry, Cain, Gingrich, and, most recently, Santorum—is that they all proved unsustainable, that in the end all but the most froth-at-the-mouth evangelical nativist wingnuts conceded that these people were at the very least unelectable. (I won’t speculate on how many would still be backing the likes of any of these candidates if they were conceivably electable; it’s enough relief to know the vast majority of Americans run screaming from the prospect of President Gingrich).

I’ve never liked Romney, always seeing him as basically fake, a reasonable simulacrum of what Hollywood imagines presidents to look like. But he was at least moderate and reasonable, as his record as governor of Massachusetts shows. And I can forgive a certain amount of flip-flopping in the name of campaigning, as that’s really just the nature of the beast. To be certain, I would have more respect for the man if he were to say something like “I passed liberal policies like health care in Massachusetts because Massachusetts is essentially a liberal state and I am not an autocrat.” Of course, that wouldn’t get him many votes among the party faithful, but it would earn him more respect than his relentless pandering.

At any rate, what I said two paragraphs ago about once seeing Romney as the sane one? Not so much anymore. And it’s not so much that he’s batshit as that he is appallingly, cynically mendacious. I watched his victory speech in the New Hampshire primary and was just left open-mouthed. It basically broke down to: (1) Obama is not American; (2) Obama is waging war on the private sector; (3) Obama is attempting to reshape America along a European socialist model; (4) hence, this election is about saving America’s soul; (5) and finally, Obama is an appeaser who wants to denude American military might, something he (Romney) will reverse and return America to its proper global military hegemony.
Seriously. Watch it:

When I hear someone like Michelle Bachman say this kind of horseshit, I’m at least convinced that she believes it. But Romney? He can’t possibly be that stupid.

These days I find myself increasingly reading conservative bloggers and essayists inveighing against precisely this kind of mendacity. When David Frum becomes the voice of reason in conservative circles, the time is out of joint. One of their frequent refrains is that such patently false accusations as Obama’s antipathy to capitalism—to say nothing of birtherism or the attempts to characterize him as an “anti-colonialist Kenyan,” to borrow Gingrich’s memorable phrase—completely miss the boat when it comes to issues on which Obama is genuinely vulnerable, such as his appalling record on civil rights and executive power (which, incidentally, are issues on which certain segments of the left and right vehemently agree).

Speaking as a committed liberal, the complete asshattery of the Republican presidential hopefuls distresses me on two fronts. The first is that I firmly believe a rational and reasonable right wing is vital to national discourse, not least because it keeps those of us on the left on our toes. The second is because it is not inconceivable that Romney might be the next president … and he has shown himself to be a man of no principle whatsoever, entirely beholden to whomever he happens to be wooing.

An overdue lament

2012-01-10T16:54:00.000-03:30

This is a long-delayed post, almost a month late. All things being equal, I was a little surprised at how affected I was by the death of Christopher Hitchens. I woke up the morning his passing hit the news to his voice—my clock radio blared him mid-invective, playing one of his more notorious anti-theistic speeches on the barbarism of circumcision, and my first thought was “My god, he died.” My second thought was that it would probably have irritated him that I prefaced my realization with “my god.”

My first real encounter with Hitchens’ writing came during my research for my dissertation, when I quoted an essay of his (collected in his book For the Sake of Argument) about Norman Mailer’s CIA conspiracy novel Harlot’s Ghost. The best part of it, unfortunately, had to be dropped into a footnote:

Harlot’s Ghost exhibits the typical Mailer touch of the ongoing question of self-definition of one’s manhood in a particular context, for which the undercurrent of homoeroticism is a constant and alluring tug. British writer Christopher Hitchens tells of the danger of questioning Norman Mailer’s heterosexuality to his face: paired up with Mailer on a talk-show once, Hitchens apparently prodded him a little too strongly on the question of just why, in novel after novel, the practice of sodomy figured so prominently. Why, Hitchens inquired, did Mailer seem so fascinated “by its warped relationship to the tough-guy ethos”? Apparently Hitchens pressed too hard—to the point where Mailer became incensed at the implication that he went in for such behaviour himself. While stopping short of offering to fight Hitchens, he some time later vented his ire in a vengeful interview with the magazine The Face, declaring that he had been attacked by “the London faggot literary coterie.” (Mailer named Hitchens, Martin Amis and Ian Hamilton as the vanguard of this “coterie.” Hitchens says that he and Amis considered writing a letter to The Face saying “that this was very unfair to Ian Hamilton, but dropped the idea.”)

What I love about this anecdote, even more now than when I first stumbled across it, is how clearly I can imagine Hitchens deftly pressing Mailer’s buttons. It’s a shame that, given the plethora of miscellany available on YouTube, I cannot find that particular clip.

I was soon to become more familiar with him in the aftermath of 9/11 and the lead-up to the Iraq war, his advocacy for which Hitchens lost many friends and became branded as apostate by former colleague on the political left. Hence in my first real exposures to his polemics, I found myself in constant disagreement with his arguments. But however infuriated his writing in favor of the invasion and prosecution of the war made me, I could not help but be impressed by his argumentation and style. As has been said by many of his opponents, the experience of reading Hitchens when you vehemently disagree with him is to say “I know you’re wrong! Now, just give me a day to get my evidence together,” because however violent the disagreement, one found oneself being persuaded by the force and rhetorical flair of his argument.

Hitchens never gave an inch on Iraq. Unlike many advocates of the war who later recanted (such as his friend Andrew Sullivan, another polemicist I greatly admire), he defended the essential rightness of the invasion until the end; and in fact doubled down in his memoir Hitch-22. But here’s the thing: I strongly encourage everyone to read his chapter justifying his support for that campaign (actually, I encourage everyone to read it entirely), not because he convinced me, but because he is so good at stripping away the pieties liberals and leftists are good at cloaking themselves in. I don’t think he makes an ironclad case, but he does make you think.

And in the end, that is what I will miss most about Hitchens’ writing—the fact that when I disagreed with him, he nevertheless made me face the weak elements of my position or, more significantly, those arguments I was channeling rather than constructing. In a lot of ways, I am just as happy to never have met him. He was notoriously pugnacious and pugilistic, combative, and frequently hostile. My own mild and milquetoast demeanour, I suspect, would not have gone over well with him.
The longer I spend in academia, the more I value those who fill the role of public intellectual—and the more that species seems to be passing from the earth. Hitchens was among the best, and he nicely summarized his personal philosophy in Hitch-22:

How … I am asked, do I find meaning and purpose in life? How does a mere and gross materialist, with no expectation of a life to come, decide what, if anything, is worth caring about? Depending on my mood, I sometimes but not always refrain from pointing out what a breathtakingly insulting and patronizing question this is. (It is on a par with the equally subtle inquiry: Since you don't believe in our god, what stops you from stealing and lying and raping and killing to your heart's content?) Just as the answer to the latter question is: self-respect and the desire for the respect of others—while in the meantime it is precisely those who think they have divine permission who are truly capable of any atrocity—so the answer to the first question falls into two parts. A life that partakes even a little of friendship, love, irony, humor, parenthood, literature, and music, and the chance to take part in battles for the liberation of others cannot be called 'meaningless' except if the person living it is also an existentialist and elects to call it so. It could be that all existence is a pointless joke, but it is not in fact possible to live one's everyday life as if this were so. Whereas if one sought to define meaninglessness and futility, the idea that a human life should be expended in the guilty, fearful, self-obsessed propitiation of supernatural nonentities… but there, there. Enough.

Even better is this:

I’d tell you to rest in peace, Hitch, but that really isn’t your style.

Best reads of 2011

2012-01-07T16:15:00.005-03:30

Happy 2012! It has been some time since I have updated my humble blog, but one of my new year’s resolutions is to do one post a week. We’ll see how that goes.

I’ve missed a lot in the lag since early September, from crucial world events to the carnival of the GOP race for the presidential nomination, to my various reads and viewings, to the sad death of Christopher Hitchens. This last event came close to inspiring a post; I wrote a draft or two of my thoughts on the occasion, but simply have not been in a blog head space for some time.

But I’m back, and let’s hope I can maintain something of a regular schedule. I miss my blog.

I thought I’d lead off 2012 with a list of my favourite reads of 2011—though I should clarify that few of these books actually came out in the past year. They are, rather, just books I read and enjoyed. So without further ado …

Monique Truong, The Book of Salt

The story of Binh, a Vietnamese cook forced to leave Saigon in the early 1920s because of his affair with the head chef of the Lieutenant Governor’s house—an affair less scandalous for being homosexual than for crossing racial boundaries. He ultimately ends up in Paris in the 1930s, employed by Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas. Besides being beautifully written—a feast in a variety of ways, and a must read for any literary foodie for its exquisite descriptions of food—it is a remarkably nuanced and deft critique of the “Lost Generation.”

George R. R. Martin, A Dance With Dragons

As any reader of this blog will know, I have been an avid follower of GRRM’s Ice and Fire series since A Game of Thrones was in hardcover … and like my fellow readers, I had to wait four long years between books three and four, and six—six years!—for book five. Which would have not been nearly as arduous were the books not so good, so readable, and addictive. Dragons was so long in the writing that many of GRRM’s formerly diehard fans turned against him starting vitriolic websites devoted to attacking what they saw as the betrayal of his obligation to them as his readers. (For the best response to such whininess, see Neil Gaiman’s comments on the subject). Coming on the heels of the incredible achievement of HBO’s Game of Thrones adaptation, Dragons did not disappoint—full of GRRM’s trademark intrigues, complex plots, nuanced characters, and surprising twists, it was almost worth the wait.

Christopher Hitchens, Hitch-22

Hitchens was diagnosed with stage four esophageal cancer almost immediately after the book was published; it was during his initial book tour that he suffered his first collapse. I had put off getting his memoir for a while, until I realized that I was, without realizing it, waiting for him to die. I was horrified at this realization. I started reading it mid-October, and finished in early November. A month and a half later her succumbed to his disease, and I was genuinely saddened by his passing—after reading his elegantly written, often self-serving, but always riveting autobiography, it was like losing a particularly prickly and sometimes infuriating great friend. Love him or hate him, he was the best of a dying breed—the public intellectual. Would that there were more like him. It is an historical irony that Kim Jong Il died only a few days afterward; I like to think the North Korean tyrant held out so that Hitch wouldn’t be around to write his epitaph.

Anne Patchett, Bel Canto

Quite simply one of the most beautifully written novels I have read in a long time. The story of an unlikely group of people brought together by a hostage situation in a nameless Central American country. A meditation on music, love, passion, and language.

Terry Pratchett: Thief of Time, The Colour of Magic, Snuff, The Light Fantastic

I continue to work my way through the vast corpus of Pratchett’s Discworld novels, which he seems to write almost as fast as I read them. Not counting the young adult novels, the current Discworld crop stands at thirty-five books, of which I have now read twenty-six. Snuff is the most recent. I am currently at work on a few articles about Pratchett, and so this has become a professional concern … but then, that’s one of the reasons I love my job.

Colson Whitehead, Zone One

A few years ago, I read Whitehead’s novel The Intuitionist, and was blown away. He is one of the most critically acclaimed contemporary American novelists, an African-American whose writing offers a truly challenging and unique take on race in America today and the entire concept of “post-blackness”. So when I read reviews of this, his most recent novel, and saw that it is his version of a zombie apocalypse narrative? Sight unseen, I put it on the fourth-year seminar I’m teaching this term. And while I have once or twice put books on courses without having previously read them, they’ve usually been well-worn canonical works I’d been meaning to read for some time. So I went on faith this time—and was not disappointed. Exquisitely written, it is at once an innovative take on the zombie genre, a valuable addition to American dystopian literature (I paired it on my course with The Road), and a painful love-letter to New York City.

Justin Cronin, The Passage

Speaking of post-apocalyptic undead yumminess: Cronin’s novel combines the best of the zombie and vampire genres into a truly terrifying narrative. And that’s all I have to say about that.

Jamie Fitzpatrick, You Could Believe in Nothing

This one is a pleasure to plug: Jamie is a friend, and so it was with delight that I found his first novel to be a (a) exceptionally well-written, and (b) totally fun and engaging, even as it was (c) vaguely disturbing to a man approaching middle age. This is a novel about hockey and Newfoundland, and the troubled masculinity of a protagonist hitting his middle years with not a heck of a lot to show for it all. If I was to suggest an analogue here, it would be Philip Roth: sport as a metaphor for fraught national and regional identity and the waning of male virility and confidence. But it has none of Roth’s pretension or self-regard, and is inimitably at once a Canadian and Newfoundland novel.

Ned Sublette, The World That Made New Orleans

I have to thank my friend and colleague Andrew Loman for turning me onto this one. While I was researching a paper on the HBO series Treme, Andrew suggested I read Sublette’s incredibly engaging and readable history of how New Orleans jazz became New Orleans jazz. Sublette does not shirk the history, going back to the original settlements of the Gulf coast, and beautifully explicates the complex relationships and interactions between English, French, and Spanish conquests and colonizations, and in the process provides one of the best histories of slavery in the Caribbean I have yet encountered.

Tim Cook, At the Sharp End

This was a Christmas gift from Kristen last year, and this year she got me the sequel Shock Troops. These are the best popular histories of Canada in World War I that I have encountered—extremely readable while also scrupulously researched. Sharp End tells the story from the start of the war to the aftermath of the Somme. It balances the broader history and the individual stories of soldiers in the trenches. One emerges with a vivid understanding of both the political realities and the horror of battle. A must-read for any military history enthusiast.

Lev Grossman, The Magicians

This novel is at once a fabulous corrective to Harry Potter and Narnia, and a cracking good yarn in its own right. Grossman takes the conceit of a school for magicians out of Rowling’s twee realm of the British boarding-school novel and turns it into a brilliant satire of the privileged culture of exclusive small east coast colleges. Quentin Coldwater is a brilliant and gifted student from Brooklyn with his eyes set on Princeton when he is recruited by Brakebills school of magic. He is also secretly obsessed with a series of fantasy novels that are a transparent analog of C.S. Lewis’ Narnia books; unsurprisingly, after many hardships and adventures at Brakebills, he and a handful of friends discover that Fillory (the Narnia clone) actually exists, and they make their way there. What I loved about this novel was that it pushes its derivative elements well past the point of simple parody. The novel is no mere satire: it is deadly serious, and its bald-faced borrowing from Rowling and Lewis acts as a trenchant critique of those books flaws and shortcomings. The second book in the series, The Magician King, sits now on my desk.

Patrick Rothfuss, The Name of the Wind, The Wise Man’s Fear

Must-reads for fantasy enthusiasts. Kvothe is a former hero whose exploits are known across the land, but has gone into quiet and deliberately anonymous retirement as an innkeeper. For a variety of reasons he decides to tell his story to a chronicler, and that is how the narrative unfolds. Extremely well written, Rothfuss’ world is richly imagined and the plot compelling. If it has a flaw, it is in somewhat thin characters at times, and a tendency to be somewhat repetitive by the end of The Name of the Wind. This is somewhat corrected in Wise Man’s Fear as young Kvothe is forced to leave his university education and go out into the world. Neither book exactly ends on a compelling note, however; unlike GRRM’s Ice and Fire books, finishing Rothfuss’ does leave me frantic for the next installment.

Stuff I was ambivalent about

Kathryn Stockett, The Help

This was one of those rare novels that worked better for me as a film—mainly because actors Viola Davis, Octavia Spencer, Allison Janney, and Jessica Chastain all brought a depth and nuance to their characters that was lacking in the novel. The novel was, to give it its due, a good read, and very well written; and it did a useful job of reminding contemporary readers just how pernicious and hateful—and all-encompassing—Jim Crow laws were. But at the same time, there was something a little cheap about it. It never hurts to remind ourselves what the pre-civil rights South was like, but Stockett effectively gave herself an easy target in the much larger realm of race in America. There are few today outside the enclaves of white supremacist compounds who would not cheer long-suffering Aibeleen and irascible Minny and boo smug, superior Hilly (and feel satisfying schadenfreude when she gets her well-deserved comeuppance). Which makes it a pretty safe narrative in the end. It is a bit ironic that one of the novel’s frequent allusions is to Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, which is also all about a virtuous white person helping African-Americans find their voices in the racist south. The difference is that when Lee wrote that novel, it was brave of her to do so.

Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion

Dawkins spends a chunk of time at the outset of the paperback edition of his atheism manifesto debunking the criticism that he is “shrill” in his denunciation of religion. He presents a coherent argument to the contrary, but you know what? He is shrill. Though perhaps “shrill” is the wrong descriptor. He is, rather, disdainful and dismissive; he is glib and mocking when a more measured argument would be more likely to carry the day. Which is not to say that I wasn’t impressed by the book—perhaps more than anything however, I learned interesting things about science. To paraphrase Toby on The West Wing, the best answer to the question “Why are you preaching to the choir?” is “Because that’s the best way to get them to sing.” For me, this book was preaching to the choir. But unlike Hitchens’ God is Not Great, The God Delusion didn’t exactly inspire me to join Dawkins in song. The melody was just too discordant.

Suzanne Collins, The Hunger Games Trilogy (The Hunger Games, Catching Fire, Mockingjay)

If I had stopped with the first book, I’d have many more glowing things to say. But in the end, I found the series disappointing, mostly because it fell into a hackneyed teenage love triangle with utterly no affect. The dystopian world Collins imagines is at once plausible and chilling, and the framing conceit of the Hunger Games themselves a useful turn on a not-uncommon SF trope. But beyond that, I was generally unimpressed.

Friday sunbeam (while they last)

2011-09-09T13:42:00.001-02:30

Back to school. Oh, and Republicans.

2011-09-08T08:22:00.000-02:30

Well, it’s my first day back teaching, and I have the usual back-to-school thrill that accompanies that. With an extra edge this morning: while having my coffee, I’ve been watching some clips from the Republican candidates’ debate, and for some reason it has me thinking about the importance of having an education.

Seriously. I thought Sarah Palin represented the nadir of know-nothingness in American politics when she first made the stage three years ago, but sometimes it seems the current crop of Republican presidential hopefuls are vying to outdo the grizzly queen. Michele Bachman in particular appeared to be working from the Palin template, but she’s even scarier—unlike the feckless Palin, she embodies an effective and focused ignorance, as highlighted in Ryan Lizza’s recent profile of her in the New Yorker.

And then Rick Perry threw his hat in the ring. Here’s Jonathan Chait’s spot-on comment about his performance in the debate: “Perry treats questions as interruptions. What scientists do you trust on climate change? I don’t want to risk the economy. Are you taking a radical position on social security? We can have reasons or we can have results.”

We can have reasons or we can have results? Seriously? What dim bulb on his staff crafted that particular genius sound bite?

But my favourite of his pithy answers was a comment on his climate change skepticism: “Galileo got outvoted for a spell.” Yes, yes he did. But here’s the thing, and here’s why listening to Perry made me think about the importance of education. Galileo frequently gets cited by climate change skeptics and advocates of creationism and intelligent design, which is a neat little rhetorical gambit: “All you ‘scientists’ think you have the answers, but really you’re just as mired in groupthink as those who persecuted Galileo.” This is of course particularly galling when it comes from creationists, but let’s consider two reasons why bringing up Heavy G in these contexts is inane.

Galileo’s single most lasting contribution to the discipline of science was not his astronomical theories, for which he was persecuted, but was in fact the invention of the discipline of science. Galileo pioneered what we now call the “scientific method,” the process of observation, hypothesis, experimentation, conclusion (usually with a whole lot of revised hypotheses and more experimentation in the middle) that is the standard practice in labs the world over. It is, in fact, how we have arrived at the theories of evolution and climate change. So to hold up Galileo as your patron saint when advocating against either is particularly inane.
Far be it for me to defend the Catholic Church, but Galileo didn’t do much to help his case when summoned to Rome to account for his heliocentric theories. He knew from observation that the solar system was sun-centered, but he didn’t have the model or the math to back it up. When ordered to prove that the earth spun on its axis, he ended up producing a half-baked justification based on the tides that, forgive the pun, simply held no water. And the Pope’s people responded predictably. The great irony was that there was ironclad mathematical proof that had been around for some time in the form of Johanne Kepler’s Astronomia Nova … proof Galileo would not use because his egomania would not permit him to cede the stage to another genius. Which just goes to show what happens when even a great scientific mind departs from the wisdom of his own scientific method.

Three years ago I was writing with great enthusiasm on this blog about Obama’s candidacy, and then his election—largely based on the perception that the know-nothingness and willful ignorance of the Bush years looked finally to be coming to an end. I have since then known countless disappointments with this president, but my greatest despair comes with the fact that the American right has doubled down on what Al Gore called the assault on reason.

It inspires two thoughts: first, I am happy to be a Canadian. Second, I go to my first classes today with renewed purpose. Perhaps I’ll drop a comment or two about Galileo.

An infographic about grade inflation

2011-08-19T13:08:00.002-02:30

Found here. This was compiled with reference to U.S. universities so some of what's here isn't quite relevant to Canadian universities, but some of it hits too close to home to be comfortable.

As of September 1st I have tenure ... and will have something more to say on the topic of grade inflation after that. But for the time being, I can happily say that A grades consistently comprise less than ten to fifteen percent of my final sheets, and I can count the number of A+'s I've given out in my six years at MUN on one and a half hands.

Grade inflation is a problem, but in my experience it happens in other grade brackets than the A range.

Created by: Masters Degree

Books, not donuts

2011-07-27T13:33:00.001-02:30

Since moving to Newfoundland, I have looked back at Toronto, my city of origin, with increasing dismay. Every time I am home and happen to wander downtown, it feels like the city has eroded … and while I’m perfectly willing to entertain the idea that part of that stems from nostalgia for the days I lived in the Annex, it’s not entirely my imagination. I find it hard to believe that for decades, literally decades, Jane Jacobs made TO her home and the city so consistently ignored her suggestions and arguments for how to improve urban life.

Well, maybe not THAT hard to believe.

Lately of course, the election of Rob Ford as mayor has me more worried about my old home than usual, mainly because he and his brother Doug have promised to outsource and privatize everything that isn’t nailed down. And most recently I encountered this petition protesting plans to privatize community libraries.

Big sigh. This more than anything I have lately encountered is emblematic of the failure of conservative imagination. I understand the arguments behind privatization and cost-cutting; I don’t agree with many of them, but I understand them. I also understand the conservative fantasy of the self-made man or woman, who pulls him/herself up by the bootstraps. It’s a lovely idea and extremely commendable when it does happen, but it doesn’t happen in a vacuum.

Community libraries are already impoverished, but even in their most rudimentary form they provide invaluable services in terms of simply providing for those who can’t otherwise afford internet access or books or any of the other dozens of information resources they make available. Community libraries have, in many cases, become employment centers, clearing-houses for job advertisements and providing assistance with creating resumes.

Privatizing libraries would essentially eliminate this resource—first by levying user fees, but more significantly by closing down when it becomes obvious that libraries are, quite simply, not profitable enterprises.

And I really need to ask Doug Ford: if in fact there are more libraries in your neighbourhood than Tim Hortons, why is that a bad thing? If anything, it reflects well on your neighbourhood. And, to perhaps put it in terms you understand, do you not think that reversing that would adversely affect your property values?

Six years

2011-07-26T11:50:00.002-02:30

I think part of the project of being a better blogger will mean not feeling compelled to write only weighty and/or lengthy posts. There was a time when I did not suffer this compunction, but then Facebook came along and it effectively became my default forum for my briefer rants, philosophical maunderings, and (hopefully) witty observances about life.

I will change that, even though my audience here is considerably smaller than my list of friends on Facebook. That being said, I notice as I look at my list of “followers” that three more people have joined this humble blog since last I looked. Considering that I haven’t posted in over a month, what drew you? By which I mean: welcome!

I’ve been working on a few posts that have, in the way of my posts, gotten a bit longer than I had planned. I had hoped to put up my it’s-been-six-weeks-since-GoT-ended jittery withdrawal symptoms / thoughtful retrospective post, but it’s busy getting nice and long and verbose. Hopefully tomorrow.

Meanwhile, I am ashamed to say I have missed two milestones. The first was this humble blog’s six-year anniversary. For those who have picked up my online maunderings midstream (and/or haven’t read my little “About Me” blurb to the right), I started this blog as a means to keep friends and family informed about my move to Newfoundland, and how life was unfolding here. Somewhere along the line as St. John’s morphed from extended tourist experience to home, I had less to say about life here and more to say about … well, really anything I was excited, perplexed, or angry about.

This blog’s birthday is July 20th, incidentally; I still remember writing the very brief first post in my newly-empty office at the University of Western Ontario. Less than a week later, I was on the road, heading for my new job at Memorial University and new life in Newfoundland.

The day before hitting the road, however, I became an uncle. My niece Morgan was born on July 25th, and yesterday she turned six years old.

Six years. So long and yet so short. Happy birthday, Miss Morgan!

Thoughts on Norway

2011-07-25T16:00:00.003-02:30

I’ve got about three new blog posts in process, in an effort to get myself back into a respectable blogging schedule, but I feel quite compelled to post a brief comment about what has happened in Norway … first, because it is a tragedy that needs to be recognized; second, because it so terrifyingly embodies the most prevalent fear in the developed world; but third, because it strikes me that the political commentary apparatus currently in place is so ill-equipped to respond to these brutal attacks in any reasonable or nuanced manner.

There are two strains of response amongst western commentators that disgust me rather a lot. The first was the knee-jerk response from the right that immediately assumed the attacks were carried out by Islamic jihadists. But just as nauseating was the schadenfreude on the left decrying the right’s response when it became evident that the perpetrator was in fact an anti-Islam, vaguely neo-Nazi radical. I say “vaguely,” because it emerges that, though he was affiliated with various white supremacist websites, he is also apparently a staunch Zionist. Which itself has given ammunition to right-wing commentators, and back and forth the argument has gone.

If this horrendous act shows us anything, it is that those driven to such violence are of a piece; as Christopher Hitchens observes, the jihadist groups actually at work in Norway gleefully took credit at first, assuming it to be one of their own … making the same assumption, ironically, as right-wing commentators in the U.S. did. Anyone who tries to delineate the “capability” or “willingness” or “likelihood” of people to perpetrate such horrors based solely on straightforward ideological or religious affiliations is being dangerously, willfully ignorant. A case in point was what has widely been considered the stupidest comment on the massacre, courtesy of Erik Eriksson of Red State, writing for CNN: “With Christians, it is rather rare to see a self-described Christian engage in heinous terrorist acts.” Which is a ludicrous statement I could spend all day taking down, but will simply say instead: Northern Ireland.

Anders Behring Breivik, the vile architect of these killings, doesn’t fit into a simple mold, any more than Jared Loughner or Timothy McVeigh did; or for that matter, any more than one can unproblematically call the late-not-lamented Osama bin Laden “Muslim.” Bin Laden, after all, was just as antagonistic to Shiites as he was Americans, and had even more loathing for Sunni Muslims he saw as abandoning his rather narrow interpretation of the Koran. Apostates were worse, in his mind, than infidels; and it’s worth noting on that front that Breivik’s target was not Muslims, but Norwegians he saw as traitors to Norway’s heritage. His attack was actually of a piece with all of the sectarian violence we saw in Iraq after the fall of Saddam—not violence against the outsider, but the countryman who does not live up to one’s absolutist ideology.

When it comes to such violence, it really ceases to be left versus right. It’s about human versus inhuman.

Game of Thrones, Episode 1.10: "Fire and Blood"

2011-06-22T19:48:00.009-02:30

Well, here we are at the end of all things … or, well, the end of Game of Thrones for the time being, as we say goodbye with the rather spectacular image of a naked Daenerys with a dragon on her shoulder. I must say: I knew that was coming, and it was still a moment that took my breath away.

As always, I am blogging with my friend Nikki Stafford from Nik at Nite, who has not read the novels … and I write from the perspective of one who has read the books from day one, and is currently counting down the days until book five in the series finally makes its long (LONG!) anticipated appearance in less than a month (squee!)

Chris: Well, I am devastated. I don’t know what I am going to do next Sunday. I think I can however safely say, and I will say this very quietly and only once, WELL FUCKING DONE, HBO. So often is fantasy brought to either the big or small screen completely ruined in the process (I’m lookin’ at you, Earthsea!). Peter Jackson, happily, reversed that trend with the Lord of the Rings trilogy; and HBO has pulled off something magnificent with Game of Thrones.

(Quick TV geek digression for Nikki’s benefit, re: casting for the upcoming The Hobbit. Evangeline Lilly of Lost and Lee Pace of Pushing Daisies have both been cast? Are you kidding? ).

But back to GoT … where to even begin? I think I’ll begin with the huge pleasure I have had these past few days reading people’s Facebook status updates after watching the finale (the winner is my former student Ashley’s blog post . Incidentally, half the images from the episode I’m putting in this post are stolen from hers), and talking to people who have not read the books. SO MANY great moments from the novel translated beautifully into the episode: Robb being hailed as King in the North; Jon’s brothers of the Watch reciting the vow to him; the Lord Commander revealing he knew of Jon’s attempted flight (“Honor set you on the Kingsroad. And honor brought you back.” “My friends brought me back.” “I didn’t say it was your honor.”); Arya facing down the boys with Needle; Tyrion being sent to act as Hand; Sansa finding some steel in her spine; Daenerys killing the shell of Drogo; and of course DRAGONS.

Deep sigh. It was all done so well, with such a deft touch. I wondered, going into the episode, how they would begin. And that opening shot with the bloody sword, and Ser Illyn picking up Ned’s head to brandish before the crowd; Sansa fainting; and Yoren cutting Arya’s hair and his repeated insistence that she is now a boy. I had been concerned about Yoren when we first met him—he seemed so different from the novel’s depiction, a hearty and hail-and-well-met kind of fellow. But seeing Ned Stark executed took the good humour out of him, I think, and his tough love where Arya is concerned is much closer to what we see of him in the novel.

Of course, the question I want to ask you is about the last moments of the show, but we should probably save that for the end. So let’s begin a little more innocuously: I really, really hope that in season two they continue with the Littlefinger/Varys show. That conversation, like all their conversations over the course of the season, was an invention of the writers. I have quite come to love the way Baelish and Varys have these little mini-plays where they poke and prod each other and reflect on the nature of power and ambition. What do you think?

Nikki: While the ending of this episode, however surprising, seemed muted compared to last week’s jaw-dropper, this was a great finale that definitely set up many, many plot points for season 2.

Oh absolutely, the conversation between those two keeps you on your toes throughout. Listening to those two talk is like watching a chess match: you know at one point there’s going to be a trick, and one is going to topple, but you don’t know when that moment is coming, or which one will be victorious. Their wits are evenly matched, with Littlefinger lobbing an insult at Varys, who’s unhurt by it and lobs something back, and Littlefinger is equally unfazed by what Varys just said. Those two are fantastic, and the actors play it brilliantly.

I like that you said Sansa found steel in her spine, because that’s almost exactly what I exclaimed when she verbally spat in that little sniveling idiot’s face, when I said, “Yes! Sansa has a spine after all!” Of all the siblings, she truly is trapped right now. Moments after we saw her faint, we see her on the sidelines of the court, red-eyed and done up in her finery with her crazy halo hair matching Cersei’s, and I thought, she just can’t escape. These people are her worst enemies, and she’s still betrothed to that piece of shit. Cersei looks uncomfortable all the time now (for the little we saw her in the episode), and I LOVED that Sansa forced herself to look at her father’s face, and instead of recoiling, she found power in it. She didn’t do what Joffrey wanted her to do in this scene. At first when I saw her look down, I thought she would throw herself over the edge of that bridge, until she took a step forward. Damn the Hound for stopping her, although he was right to do so. I’m actually quite fascinated by the Hound, to be honest, and hope he plays a significant role in the next season.

I also enjoyed the scene where we find out the old fart (whose name escapes me) isn’t an old fart at all, but a spry man pretending to be old and decrepit. That scene was very amusing, but if he were able to be with Roxanne, she had to figure there’s SOME life in the old guy!

Arya making the long walk north pretending to be a boy – alongside Robert’s bastard son, no less – should provide some very interesting fodder for the next season. My first question to you is, does book 2 pick up immediately where book 1 left off?

Chris: Not exactly. The prologue of A Clash of Kings takes us to the island of Dragonstone, where we meet Stannis Baratheon for the first time. And then the first chapter of the novel proper is Arya walking north with Yoren and the rest of the Night’s Watch “recruits.”

And you are correct in assuming that Arya’s journey north is compelling and, as you say, excellent narrative fodder. I don’t think I’m giving anything away when I say that the journey ends up being, ah, more circuitous than was planned at the outset. ;-)

And the old fart whose name you’re forgetting is Grand Maester Pycelle … the scene was interesting, and a complete invention. At first I wasn’t sure what to make of it, but I kind of liked it in the end … he is about as much of a schemer as Littlefinger and Varys, so it’s kind of cool that they’re establishing his dotage as just a façade. Which will be good for the next season—he and Tyrion have quite the showdown, heh.

Speaking of everyone’s favourite Halfling, what did you think of the interaction between Tywin and Tyrion? We know quite well at this point that Tyrion is one of the smartest (if not the smartest) character in the series … obviously his father sees in him some value, even as he despises him for his whoring and the sin of being a dwarf. Again, not giving anything away in saying that this sets up Tyrion’s principal plotline for season two—he takes his wildlings to King’s Landing, and has the unenviable task of trying to rein in Joffrey’s worst tendencies.

Nikki: That was a great scene, especially the look on Tyrion’s face when it slowly dawns on him that his father is complimenting him. I loved the line, “I took you for a stunted fool,” with Tyrion’s response, “Well, you were half right.” I cannot WAIT to see him try to be the Hand of THAT king.

How old is Joffrey meant to be when he becomes king, do you know? Is he about 15 or older than that? I couldn’t quite remember how old he was said to be at the beginning of the series.

But as the new king rises, it’s time to talk about the other king falling, and the death of Khal Drogo. What a devastating moment. It reminded me of a scene in a later season of Buffy (because of our ongoing Buffy Rewatch, I don’t want to give anything away), where someone wants to raise the dead and is warned that what you bring back might look like them, but it isn’t actually them. Daenerys asked for Drogo’s life, and she got it, but that’s not what she meant. I was on the verge of tears watching her begging her “sun and stars” to come back to her. I thought perhaps there would be a strange scene of the sun appearing to rise in the west and he’d come back to her, but it wasn’t meant to be.

And the very end was interesting, because early in the season, I can’t remember which episode, she places a dragon egg in the fire and picks it up, but it doesn’t hurt her hand. I remember saying to my husband, “Maybe the eggs are like popcorn and they’ll pop open and the dragons will jump out.” Of course, when Daenerys herself was walking toward the pyre that image was the LAST thing on my mind, and all I could think of is when Daenerys was told in last week’s episode that once Drogo was dead, she was nothing, but man, if that woman survives the pyre burning, they’ll be loathe to walk away from her! So when Ser Jorah walked up to her and she lifted her head, I thought that was the miracle. Until something popped up behind her and I thought, “Oh my GOD she spilled water on Gizmo and there’s a Gremlin behi— no, wait… OMG it’s a dragon.”

A freakin’ DRAGON.

Oh, take THAT, Joffrey!!!!!!

Chris: In the novel, Joffrey is thirteen. I think he’s supposed to be fifteen or so in the series.

What I love most about GRRM’s storytelling is how consistently he subverts your expectations. Ned is the hero? He’s going to escape to join Daenerys? NO! BAM! He’s dead. Drogo is going to cross the sea with Daenerys and reclaim her kingdom? NO! BAM! He’s dead. But then into those shocked spaces he instead advances less expected, and better plots … Dany seems to lose everything, but emerges from the fire with dragons. Ned is killed, but his son is crowned King of the North. Jon Snow finds himself in the vanguard of the only war that really matters.

And so on.

This final episode was really emotionally charged for me, and not just because I knew what was coming … the final bit with the dragon appearing over Daenerys’ shoulder was simply perfect, and I rewound and watched the last three minutes no fewer than half a dozen times. The emotional timbre of the scene was pitch-perfect, with Jorah’s shocked and amazed expression as he, and everyone around Dany, sinks to their knees to pledge themselves to her. That is the moment that she becomes a queen.

The death of Drogo, however, is genuinely heartbreaking, because of course he does not die at first. Seeing him as an empty husk is worse than seeing him fall in a fight; and the ambivalence we feel when Mirri Maz Duur unapologetically admits that she knew exactly what she was doing is emblematic of the way the series (and the novel) never panders or gives us clear-cut rights and wrongs. Drogo’s khalasar DID commit atrocities—they did take women to be raped, even in spite of Dany’s intervention, and enslave half a village and slaughter the other half. Of course Mirri Maz Duur didn’t want Drogo’s son to be born, and none of Daenerys’ best intentions can change the woman’s hatred of the Dothraki.

I also have to give props to Sophie Turner. Playing Sansa is something of a thankless role, as she had to be bratty and annoying for the better part of the season while everyone rhapsodized in reviews and online about Arya and Daenerys. A question that frequently came up among the n00bs was “Does Sansa ever get less annoying?” And the answer, of course, is a resounding yes. She has learned hard lessons, and the hatred on her face when she faces down Joffrey at the end makes up for all her previous simpering.

And as long as we’re on the topic of thankless roles, let’s not forget to give a shout-out to Jack Gleeson, whose excruciatingly hateful portrayal of Joffrey was brilliantly done—and spot on, as far as the novel goes. And unlike Sansa, he gets no redeeming moment … we end the season hating him even more than we did at its outset.

So there we are. Big sigh … Now we have to wait a year, or however long it’s going to take HBO to get season two together (pleasepleaseplease do not pull a year and a half hiatus, a la The Sopranos … it was bad enough waiting six years between books).

Take it home, Nikki!

Nikki: Wow, the last word on such a fantastic season. I didn’t say anything about the King of the North scene, but yes, that was amazing, and I loved the look of pride on Catelyn’s so recently anguished face, as well as her earlier promise to Robb that they will go to King’s Landing, find Sansa and Arya, and then kill all of the Lannisters (the women in this episode are SO strong). And while I hope Jaime Lannister gets beaned in the head by a few more boulders along the way, I found the scene between him and Catelyn to be intriguing when he simply tells her the truth when answering every one of her questions about Bran… all except that last “why?” of course.

I can’t wait for next season, and I plan to read the first book now to see for myself what the show was based on (but I’ll have the opposite experience of you, because my reading will be coloured by the way the TV characters are now in my head, whereas your viewing of the show was influenced by what you’d read). But the way they’ve left it, I’m not sure if I’ll be able to wait on reading the second book.

But the one thing that will hold me off from reading that second book is the chance to do this again with you. I want to extend a huge thank-you on behalf of myself and my readers for agreeing to do this every week with me, giving us your insight without spoiling what was to come (where else could we get the perspective of a GRRM fan and still have Ned’s death be an absolute shock?) and making this a much richer experience for all of us. I do hope we can do it again on the second season.

Until then, may the warm winds blow from the South, may the Dragon make her way to King’s Landing, may the King of the North prevail, and may Joffrey cut himself with a razor, trip and fall into a vat of peroxide, break both his legs on the way in, end up in a half-body cast, and have the inside of that cast invaded by fire ants.

Ah, I knew playing “Worst-Case Scenario” in public school would pay off some day…

See y’all in season 2!

Game of Thrones, Episode 1.09: "Baelor"

2011-06-13T20:58:00.010-02:30

And here we are at the penultimate episode of Game of Thrones, which ends with the shock all of us GRRM geeks have been waiting for. As always, I blog here with my good friend Nikki Stafford from Nik at Nite, who has not as yet read the novel’s of GRRM’s Ice and Fire series. Nikki suggested we post on this episode two days earlier than usual, as this is was a pretty devastating episode, and we’re both pretty certain that people want to jump in and talk about it.

So: give ‘er.

Chris: So, kind of a boring episode, eh? Nothing really happened, just your usual run-of-the-mill stuff. Certainly nothing to shock the n00bs. ;-)

But seriously, folks … Ned’s TOTALLY UNEXPECTED execution is the moment, in reading the novel, when you suddenly think “Holy shit, this guy plays for keeps.” And that realization sort of comes in stages, as the actual beheading is described vaguely enough that you spend much of the rest of the novel waiting for the revelation that he’s not actually dead. I’ve had several acquaintances finish A Game of Thrones and say, “OK, so this is a Gandalf thing, right? He ‘died,’ but is going to come back in the second book?” I’m pretty happy they didn’t really leave anything to the imagination in the series—now I don’t have to be all mysterious about whether or not Ned actually got it, or worry about having “Yep, he’s dead” be a total spoiler.

Yep, he’s dead. And just a word of warning for those embarking on reading the series: do NOT get too attached to any of your favourite characters. NO ONE IS SAFE.

But of course, the shocking finale of the episode threatens to eclipse everything else that happened, and, all things being equal, this was a pretty eventful episode. And also an episode that warrants another of my “what they changed” lists:

Shae—in the novel she is not “foreign.” I don’t know what that change bothered me, but it did a little. I kept waiting for Tyrion to guess, in their drinking game, “that accent is fake!” and have her relent and start speaking like the Westeros girl she is in the novels.
And yeah … that drinking game was not within ten city blocks of the novel. A nifty device to reveal stuff about Tyrion, but it totally screwed up the pacing of an otherwise gripping episode.
Tyrion getting accidentally conked on the head and missing the battle. That bugged me a little—in the novel, he fights; and his hillmen aren’t in the vanguard, they’re on the left flank, as Tywin assumed they would collapse in battle and entice the northerners into a charge that would leave them enveloped.
Also, they missed a chance to use one of my favourite of Bronn’s lines: encouraging Tyrion before the battle, he says, “A little man like you with a large shield? You’ll give the archers fits.”
In the novel, Robb did not sacrifice two thousand men, but sent a healthier host south to engage Tywin Lannister and then retreat, as a diversion, while they took on Jaime Lannister’s force.
Also, I don’t know if this gripe fits under “what they changed,” but—snow in the Riverlands? Seriously? That strikes me as a HUGE continuity error.

OK, I think that’s enough for that list. What would you like to talk about, Nikki? :-)

Nikki: OK. Breathe, Nikki… BREATHE.

OHMYGODICANTBELIEVETHATJUSTHAPPENED!!!!!!!!

OK, I think that was a rather calm response, don’t you??

I have been watching television for many years, as you all know. I have been WRITING about television and studying it for many years, as many of you know. In that time, there are certain things I know to be true: when a character pops up out of nowhere with a tiny role, but the part is played by a giant of film or television, that is going to become a recurring character (unless it’s on 30 Rock and the cameo was touted in commercials for weeks leading up to it); when a character has been built up with such a rich history surrounding him, and a clear path of right and wrong drawn before him, where you can see how he could join forces with this camp or that one, you know he will remain a focal point of the show; you do NOT kill off your lead… you don’t kill off Jack Shephard on Lost or Buffy on Buffy or Sydney Bristow on Alias because, as mentioned earlier, if much of the show’s plot and mythology has been built around that character, you don’t have much of a bloody show without him/her; when that lead is in terrible peril and you know there may be a way out, there is ALWAYS a way out, especially if people who side with that person are not immediately present in the scene… in which case they shall come swooping in at the last second, lopping off the executioner’s head and saving the day; when you have SEAN BEAN in the lead, you don’t kill him off!!!!!!!

OK, sorry… I’m kind of becoming hysterical again. I think I can say there hasn’t been an ending of an episode that has shocked me the way that did. The end of Lost’s season 5, when Jack dropped the bomb and they didn’t show what the frak happened and just ended the season there… that made every fan scream in frustration. But the events themselves weren’t a shock. I’ve seen characters get killed off, and that was upsetting, but that’s reserved for the end of the series and not near the end of the FIRST BLOODY SEASON!!!

Simply put (in case all of this maniacal ranting wasn’t clear) that ending shocked the hell out of me. My hands were tightly clasped over my mouth, my eyes were gaping open, and I screamed a crazy person’s scream (thank goodness for those hands over the mouth). My husband and I gawped at each other, and I think he may have spoken first, saying, “They killed him!”
“No!” was all I could say once I let out that breath I’d been holding in.
“I can’t believe they killed him!”
“That didn’t just happen. Back it up and let’s watch again.”
“They killed him.”
“How is… what… why would… oh my GOD.”

Honestly I don’t know how I’m going to get through the rest of this week’s post. So much for analysis. I’m just rambling on and on with my reaction. I’ll turn it back over to Chris while I continue to try to get my head around this, because I still have SO much more to say but I’m bogarting the action with my shock and awe. (And by the way, for the record, I think it was a BRILLIANT move on the part of the writers, not a mistake, because I will never, ever forget that moment of television watching…)

Chris: Hee.

I think I speak for all (or most) GRRM fans when I say just how cathartic that moment of television was. Everyone I know who has read the novels invariably says something along the lines of “I can’t wait to see people’s reactions when they kill Ned.” Because it really is something of a game-changing moment—as I said above, it’s the moment when you realize GRRM ain’t your grandma’s fantasy writer. It is akin to the end of The Murder of Roger Ackroyd when you discover that the murderer is SPOILER (yeah, not going to give that one away here)—a brilliant moment of generic rule-breaking.

And as long as we’re on the topic, can I gush for a moment over how well that scene was done? It was handled perfectly, from Arya’s arrival to the emergence of Ned, to Joffrey’s sickeningly self-satisfied grin when Ned calls him the true king, to Cersei’s look of horror when she realizes what Joffrey is doing … and finally to that heartbreakingly long moment of muffled silence as Ned realizes that he is about to die. It was all more or less exactly as it is described in the novel, except for two things: Ned spotting Arya crouching at the base of the statue, and telling Yoren that she is there. (For those who didn’t understand the communication, the statue is of Baelor the Blessed, the holiest of the Targaryen kings—Ned shouts “Baelor!” at Yoren, who then spots and rescues Arya). I must say, I loved this little change: it gives Arya and Ned one last moment of connection, and reinforces for Ned just why he’s agreeing to this travesty of his honor. It plays as a beautiful foil to Maester Aemon’s little lecture to Jon Snow on honor versus love; in the end, Ned chooses love, love of his children. Jon’s stipulation that his father would “Do whatever is right, no matter what” then becomes an interesting philosophical question—did Ned do the right thing? Was it right to choose his daughters over his honor?

Whatever the answer, it was for naught, and Joffrey shows his autocratic, capricious ways. He will come to plague his family with his willfulness as the books proceed. I hope everyone has a stomach for his repulsiveness—it finds way more outlets for expression in book two.

Assuming, Nikki, that you’ve caught your breath by now, what did you think of the episode’s other shocking moments? Which, admittedly, seem only mildly surprising next to Ned’s decapitation.

Nikki: I think it will be several days before I’ve caught my breath. I think I need to watch it again, just to see the end part. (On a completely random side note, my daughter watches the excruciatingly awful “Suite Life on Deck” on Family, and the other day it had the first funny line I’ve seen, where one guy tells this group of environmentalists that the captain has capitulated to their demands, to which ditzy London — who always misunderstands big words — exclaims, “Oh my GOD, they cut off his head?!” Heh.) Anyway, what I found in this episode, now thinking back on it, was that many of the scenes were there to help bolster up the very expectation I was suggesting they tore asunder with Ned’s death. Khal Drogo appears close to death, and I do NOT want him to die, and said to my husband, “They CAN’T kill him off, not after everything we’ve gone through with him and Dany”… and they seem to have found a way around that. Tyrion is knocked unconscious in battle, and the next thing you see is him appearing to be floating above the battlefield, tricking the viewer momentarily into thinking he’s dead and having an out-of-body experience… one I didn’t fall for simply because he’s Tyrion, and you simply can’t kill HIM off. We see Catelyn ride into the Walder (sp?) fortress, and we know she’s probably not in any grave danger because, well, she’s Catelyn, and they won’t kill her, right?

Now I’ll never rest easy. I’m thinking Drogo and Tyrion and Sam and Arya will be in a massive battle to the death next week at this rate. Cripes.

So that is perhaps why they added in the Tyrion scene. But as you say, I would have much rather seen him do battle, especially since we’ve seen him bludgeon a guy to death with a shield. :::shudder:::

But back to Ned (see, I just can’t let it go… Lost has taught me nothing), aside from the shock that ending gave me, I’m really saddened by that final, terrible, beautiful few moments of his life, which at the time I didn’t realize were his final ones. He sees Arya crouching on that statue (and THANK YOU for explaining the name of the statue, because my big question of the week was, why was the episode called Baelor? Is there any tie, by the way, to Baelish?). There’s a look of pain and shame on her face, and of course, anger that her father is spouting such blatant lies. I kind of hated Sansa in this scene, who, on the one hand, is trying desperately to save her father’s life, but on the other, is allowing him to compromise his very soul with those final words. Joffrey made his pronouncement, and Arya made her move. As she was weaving her way toward the stage, I began yelling, “Come on, Arya! Show us what those dancing lessons taught you!! Arya for the WIN!” I was so convinced she would be his savior. Silly me. But now, with a clearer head, I know she would have walked to her own death, and her father’s and possibly Sansa’s, too. Stopping her was the only thing that could have been done in this scene.

But my heart broke when Ned looked out to that statue one last time and she was gone. The one person who seemed to share his soul was gone, and he would never look at her again. Heartbreaking.

You remember what happened to Viserys a couple of episodes back? That’s child’s play compared to what I want to happen to Joffrey, that sniveling little toad excrement.

So… once word gets over to Ned’s son and his army of bannermen, I’m wondering how long Jaime Lannister is for this world…

Chris: Speaking of that bit where Tyrion seems to be floating over the ground, can I call foul on the director for totally ripping that whole thing off of Gladiator?

I loved all the Drogo/Daenerys parts of this episode, just as I did in the novel. It’s such a harrowing sequence as we realize that however powerful Dany has become, however much she has come into her own, her power as far as the Dothraki are concerned is entirely dependent on Drogo. Jorah’s urgent entreaty for them to flee at first seems cowardly until he explains what is at stake: the khalasar is held together solely by Drogo’s strength—once that strength ebbs, the whole house of cards threatens to come down. And yet Dany hangs on, desperate, willing even to trust to blood magic. And … well, we’ll see how that works out next Sunday.

We also finally get to see Jorah’s own skill with a sword, and he proves himself not as nimble as his Dothraki foe, but tougher—delivering the killing blow while his enemy’s blade is literally stuck in his hip. It’s an interesting little preview of what a war between the Dothraki and Westeros might look like.

But to return to Tyrion, what did you think of his confession during the drinking game? I reiterate my annoyance with the drinking game sequence, but it was really there to reveal one of the defining moments of Tyrion’s life, and the root of his antipathy to his father: his short-lived marriage, and the horrifyingly cruel way in which Tywin ended it. Again, though I disliked the scene the story was embedded in, I thought Dinklage’s retelling of it was heartbreaking.

(Also, now that Shae has made her appearance I can say without fear of spoilage that I had wondered if perhaps the ubiquitous Roz was going to show up as the whore whom Tyrion takes on in the field. But no—she stays in King’s Landing, which means there’s a more likely role for her in season two).

Nikki: Yes, that Dany/Drogo scene was rather disheartening. She’d come so far, and I’ve said in past weeks that she’s gone from being this character who is the object of the story’s misogyny, whether from her brother or husband, to one of extreme feminine toughness, rising above her outsiderness and becoming one of the Dothraki. The scene of her eating the heart was the peak of her power among them, and is the moment when Viserys noticed it and realized she has power because she is loved and respected, and he doesn’t have what she does. But he was wrong. She’s only powerful, as you say, as Drogo’s wife. Nothing more. She means absolutely nothing without him, Dragon or no. I admired her strength in refusing to let the Dothraki rape and pillage, but by taking that away from them, they are certainly questioning their Khaleesi. I hope we see the Dragon emerge next week. ;)

I also want to say on a sidenote that I really enjoy listening to the way the Dothraki language is delivered. Dany says it with some ease, but with a very different accent than the Dothraki use. Drogo speaks it so quickly it’s as if it was the actor’s native language, and the man who challenged her in the episode over and over again (I can’t remember his name) spoke it less gutterally, but with the same accent as Drogo. The way he said “Khaleesi” was entirely different from the way Dany says it, or the way that slave girl said it who worked for her (and who was English-speaking). What a nice, subtle touch.

While there are moments where Dinklage’s English accent doesn’t quite work for me (he seems to say so many of the words with an affectation and a sneer, but in a way that works for his character), I thought his retelling of that story was, as you say, heartbreaking. One wonders if Tyrion is such a sexual character – it’s how we were first introduced to him, after all – because of the way he was treated when he was 16. Perhaps with that woman, his “wife,” he felt like a whole man for the first time in his life, and he’s been attempting to recreate that by cavorting with other whores. Or, could it be some sort of self-punishment, sleeping with so many whores because he’s resigned himself to the belief that he will never find a woman who is not a whore who will actually love him? I just love this character, and that story added a much deeper layer to him this week.

Incidentally, I was reading this week’s Rolling Stone magazine (a book I’d been editing for the past year was reviewed positively in it!) and there was a brief interview with Dinklage. My favourite part of the article was where they talked to Lena Headey, who plays Cersei, who said she’d been very aware of Dinklage’s other roles, and when he walked in the room she was prepared to meet a man who was small. What she wasn’t prepared for, she said, “Was that he would be THAT hot.” Hahaha!

While it doesn’t compare to the shock of the ending, I must say the other gasp moment in this episode was finding out the old blind man (notice how I don’t use names because I simply can’t keep track of them all) at the Wall was, in fact, a Targaryen! Another fascinating backstory! Did that match the scene in the book?

And while I’m firing questions at you, with only one episode left to go, does it feel to you, a reader of the book and someone who’s aware of what is still left to cover, that they are rushing things at all? While the pace is much quicker than it was earlier, and while I do believe there are a lot of things they may still have left to cover, I’m really enjoying the pace, but I wonder if fans of the books feel differently?

Chris: No, I actually think they’ve done an admirable job in pacing the story. When I first heard it would be ten episodes, I was a little concerned that it would be rushed … but I’ve never felt that it has been. I would in fact go so far as to hold up GoT as an example of how to adapt a novel to the screen—with the exception of one or two missteps (which, frankly, might just be me being cranky), the realization of GRRM’s narrative in televisual format has been exceptionally well done. And really, the proof is in the pudding—the fact that so many people I know who haven’t read the novels (like your own lovely self) are absolutely LOVING the series.

I will say nothing about what is in store for Dany next week, aside from saying—don’t worry. All her growth and strength has not been for naught, and the sense that she relies absolutely on Drogo for her power is … well, again, I’ll wait for next week. Suffice to say: the Daenerys we met in episode one would have fled with Jorah. The Daenerys we have now is an entirely different woman.

I agree with you entirely on how smart the writers have been with the Dothraki language. I can’t recall if this has come up before, but they hired a linguistics professor to invent the language. A lot of GRRM’s uber-fans—the type who teach themselves Klingon or Sindarin—asked him for Dothraki grammar and vocabularies so they could learn the language. To which he had to reply, with chagrin, that he had invented all of about seven words. So the achievement with the language in the series is astounding, and Jason Momoa in particular has been particularly impressive with how fluent he sounds. Not just a piece of beefcake, that fellow. It almost makes me want to go see Conan the Barbarian.

So … one more episode left. I am so going to miss this series when it is done, and will have to rewatch it from the start several times just to fill the hole it’s going to leave (that the Seven for PVRs). I’ve been thinking through several article ideas that will give me an excuse to go back and rewatch it under the guise of “research” … there is, I think, certainly something to be done comparing this series to The Wire.

Any final thoughts, Nikki?

Nikki: Only that while waiting for your final missive to come back to me, I was doing an image search for pictures of this episode (they always seem to pop up a few days later, so the pickins were slim) but when I search for “Ned Stark execution” there was a photo of Ned holding the sword in that first episode, and I realized that’s the parallel scene to this one. In that opening episode, the man runs into camp and claims to have seen the white walkers and the wights. Ned doesn’t believe him, and in his black-and-white world, says the man must be executed if he’s suspected as a traitor. Here the sword comes back around, taking Ned’s head because he was too honest and told Cersei what he had discovered, and didn’t act when he should have. Oh Ned…

I, too, will miss this show… I can’t believe we have to wait another year for the next season! I will also miss our discussions; this has been a lot of fun!

I cannot wait for next week’s episode, because I want to know what will happen to Dany… to Sansa… to Ned’s son and his army… to Cersei… to Jaime… to Drogo… and to Jon Snow. So many people revolved around Ned, so I’m interested to see what happens when the centre is gone.

Game of Thrones 1.08: "The Pointy End"

2011-06-08T20:00:00.002-02:30

Hello again, and welcome to the eighth instalment of the Game of Thrones co-blogging project between myself—who has read the Ice & Fire novels—and Nikki Stafford, from the blog Nik at Nite, who has not ... wherein we hope to provide a useful dialogue on what is proving to be, episode after episode, an amazingly good television series from HBO.

This week was no exception, once again upping the ante and providing those “OMFG!” moments to shock the n00bs and provide geek-out fodder for the GRRM vets. This week it is Nikki’s turn to lead us off, so I cede the floor to her ...

Nikki: WOW, what an episode!! I think this show just gets better and better. This is the first episode actually written by George RR Martin, and it showed. He managed to cover a ton of ground in under an hour, moving us to the final two episodes. The attack on the Starks at the beginning, that amazing swordfight, Tyrion and Tywin together, King Joffrey (excuse me... I feel sick to my stomach again), Dany trying to soften Drogo, the walking dead attacking Snow... all that AND watching a direwolf take two fingers off a guy. Can a gal ask for more in an hour of television??

I want to start with the swordfight, because my husband and I were whooping and gasping aloud. It was BRILLIANTLY choreographed, and an astounding way to move us from Arya’s “dancing” lessons into the real world of swordfights. Ned certainly didn’t skimp when it came to finding the best teacher for her... he was incredible to watch, taking down most of an army with a wooden sword. And the repetition of his mantra from earlier – “What do we say to Death?” “Not today” – was wonderful and heartbreaking. We didn’t see what happened when Arya ran out of the room... I’d like to think he did a quick somersault and grabbed one of the dead men’s swords to take out the leader. My husband thinks he’s such a fantastic character they wouldn’t kill him off. But I wonder if he was, like King Robert, a catalyst to take Arya from one level to the next. I won’t ask you to spoil it, Chris, since we’ll probably find out soon, but I thought that scene was just absolutely stunning.

But of course, it would be easily overlooked with so much else happening in this episode! The scene where Drogo’s men try to rape and pillage the people as Dany looks on was shocking, and what happened afterwards really moved those characters forward. How did that scene compare to the book?

Chris: I think the scene of rape and pillage is one of those instances where seeing it rendered that well on the screen is more affecting than reading it—mainly because it removes whatever defence mechanisms we have when we read to make it more palatable. It basically followed the book exactly, except that the part where Drogo’s man challenges him and they fight is new. And ... wow. More than one person I have talked to has admitted that the climax of that fight was an uneasy conflation of icky and sexy. And Drogo continues to come into his own as a character—he’s been rocking the house for the past two episodes.

I will admit, I sqeed a little as Syrio took out the Lannister men. That was yet another scene that was perfectly done, and deeply satisfying to see Syrio in action. The ending is of course sad ... and I will say nothing spoilery about Syrio’s fate.

The closer we get to the end of the season, the more each episode becomes a total geek-fest for me as I watch how they’ve brought all GRRM’s goodness to the screen. I was especially excited about this episode, because I knew we would see the wights for the first time. It sort of makes me regret not having made a point of giving these posts an episode-specific title, if for no other reason than this week’s could have been “The Ice Zombies Cometh.”

You once asked me before if I ever wish I could watch this without having read the novels; at this point, not so much, because it is at least as great a pleasure to see how that adapt it. And to imagine how people such as yourself, who haven’t read the books, will react to seeing such moments as Ned’s betrayal by Littlefinger, the true prowess of Syrio, Arya using Needle for real for the first time, Robb coming into his own as a commander, Tyrion’s alliance with the Mountain Clans ...

That last element was something I quite enjoyed. They have Tyrion acting more hesitant in the series than in the book, but the payoff is when they’re looking down at the Lannister camp and Shagga warns Tyrion that if “if the Halfman cheats us, Shagga will cut off his manhood ...” and Tyrion impatiently finishes, “And feed it to the goats, yes.” Shagga is constantly threatening to cut off people’s manhoods and feed them to the goats in the book; in that brief moment of Peter Dinklage’s superb indifference, this repetition is communicated beautifully.

But back to the ice zombies. I always must remind myself that this novel was first published in 1996, before the walking dead hit critical mass on film and television. What was your reaction to their appearance here?

Nikki: Fantastic. I loved the scene prior where Sam points out that the men don’t smell. (I’ve just started following the actor who plays Sam, @johnbradleywest on Twitter, and he’s hilarious.) Perhaps Sam’s strength won’t be in his fighting skills, but in his brains. But back to the scene itself, it was terrifying. You can’t kill the dead who won’t be killed, and it offered a real supernatural element to the show. It’s something that the series opened with, when we saw the massacre out in the woods, and I thought the show would have several supernatural elements. Instead, it hints at them – there used to be dragons, Dany can’t be burned, the white (wight?) walkers are the dead come back to life, the direwolves have an attachment to their owners – but it’s not overt. But now it is. I knew something bad had to be going on if it freaked out a direwolf. It was scarier than The Walking Dead, to be honest, because on that show you expect the zombies. You don’t expect them here.

I’d mentioned last week that I wondered if Tyrion would give as good as he got when he met his father, or if his dad could be the one person who disarmed him. In the scene we got, it was a bit of both. There was the hesitation on the hill (and you are bang-on with your observation about the way Dinklage says the line – not having read the books, I didn’t realize Shagga had repeated that line over and over, and yet just assumed he had by the way Tyrion responded to him) and you can see Tyrion is nervous when he goes to his father, but he walks into the tent without hesitation, and introduces his men. You can tell there’s no love lost between Tywin and Tyrion (I’m surprised that Tywin would have given his dwarf son the name that sounds most like his, while his other son has a completely different name... perhaps because Tyrion came first?) and when Tywin said that rumour had it Tyrion was dead, there’s a sound in his voice like he’s disappointed that isn’t actually the case. You can tell by Tyrion’s face that he picks up on it, too, but he’s also used to being treated like that, and it doesn’t surprise him.

You asked a couple of weeks ago if I’d trust Varys or Littlefinger, and neither one of them seems particularly trustworthy. Now we have Littlefinger having betrayed Stark, but Varys is the one sneaking water down to the dungeon. I wonder if his caring is genuine, though, or if Varys and Littlefinger are smart enough to know Ned’s important to keep alive. I did love the dialogue between them, though, especially at the end: Ned: “Tell me, Varys, who do you truly serve?” Varys: “The Realm, sir. Someone must.”

Chris: The trope in a lot of contemporary fantasy is this “post-magical” world. I think it was set up in part by the sense of a waning culture in The Lord of the Rings, which of course ends with the elves passing into the West and the rise of the Age of Man. With novels like those of GRRM, we get a sense of a world in which magic remains, but only in traces, a shadow of the power it once had.

The relationship between Tyrion and his father is pretty fraught—Tywin resents his dwarf son (remember Tyrion’s comment to Jon Snow in episode one: “In the eyes of their fathers, all dwarfs are bastards”), doubly so because Tyrion’s mother died giving him birth. But he also has to acknowledge him as a Lannister. The cruel irony of it all is that Tyrion is more his father’s son than is Jaime, at least in terms of his shrewd intellect. We see Tywin’s own shrewdness at work when he flatters the representatives of the hill tribes into joining his army, recognizing them as a potential asset. It wouldn’t have occurred to Jaime to ally himself with them as Tyrion does—he would more likely have fought to the death when they came upon him in the forest.

And just to clarify: Tyrion is the third of Tywin’s children, with the twins Jaime and Cersei being born several years before him.

It was at this point in the novel that Varys really sort of became interesting to me—because we finally start to get a sense of the depth of his machinations, but also a sense of what may or may not be their altruism. Of course, you never know—and when he tells Ned he serves the Realm, the big question is: what is the Realm? Does he mean whatever the most peaceful path is? Whoever the anointed king is? Or does he plot to bring back the Targaryen dynasty?

Nikki: Interesting you should say that, because my husband and I were talking about Ned when he was in chains, and I wondered... is it possible that Ned could get away and align himself with the Targaryens? Now THAT would be an interesting combination.

The game of thrones certainly shifts in this episode, where you begin to see how people could switch sides. Catelyn goes to her sister (HONESTLY, watching Robyn pull at his mother’s cape ties while moaning that he’s hungry just made me hope there aren’t any pregnant women watching, because they’ll be put off breastfeeding forever...) to plead for her help to go up against the Lannisters, her sister refuses and says her job is to keep her idiot-boy son safe, rather than align herself with Catelyn. Catelyn rejoins part of her clan, and you can see the pressure building on both sides: Starks vs. Lannisters. The Lannisters also want to destroy the Targaryens, but Ned defended Dany and her unborn child. Hm...

Two questions I have for you this week that I hope can be answered without spoilage: I seem to have missed who the guy was who stood up against the one Stark son and ended up losing two fingers. Is he the head of his army? And secondly, have we gotten an explanation for why there are certain trees with faces on them that appear to be crying blood? Are they carved that way? Or do the followers believe the trees suddenly appeared and what they see is a sign from their higher power? (And if this is an explanation to come later, we can leave it for now.)

Chris: Happily, I can answer both questions without a whiff or hint of spoilage.

Robb’s antagonist is Jon Umber—called the Greatjon—one of Ned Stark’s bannermen. What needs to be understood is how GRRM establishes the seven kingdoms as explicitly feudal: which means that being a lord entails responsibility to the people who live on your lands, and fealty to the more powerful lord to whom you are sworn. Each of the seven kingdoms (plus the Riverlands) has their liege lord—Ned Stark, for example, is the lord of the North. All of the lords beneath him are sworn to his service. All of these most powerful lords, in turn, are sworn to obey the king. But as the new king’s legitimacy is challenged, we see the seven kingdoms beginning to splinter.

So what Robb did when he ordered Maester Luwin to “call the banners” was to order all the lords sworn to House Stark to raise arms and follow him. Now, in the feudal system, the land-bearing lords would all be knights, or at least mounted heavy cavalry, having been raised in castles and trained by men-at-arms—remember how Jon Snow so easily handed everyone else’s asses to them in the practice yard? That was because he’d been trained since he was a child. Each of the lords then presses their commonfolk into service—they make up the footsoldiers of the assembled army.

So basically, the Greatjon is one of Robb Stark’s most senior lords, and what he was basically arguing about was his right to lead the army’s vanguard—a place of honour. That Robb had given that honour to another led him to challenge Robb’s authority, and Robb’s response (before siccing his direwolf on him) was to warn him that if he took his men and left, his life would be forfeit as an oathbreaker.

Sorry, slipped into lecture mode there for a moment. ;-)

To answer the second question in a less long-winded manner: the trees with faces are weirwoods, believed by those who follow the Old Gods to be those gods’ vessels. I’ve never quite been certain whether the faces are naturally-occurring or carved into them, but they appear to cry blood because their sap is red.

Well. That was quite the episode this week, and apparently it was the highest-rated one so far. The show seems to be gaining momentum in terms of its audience, and was nominated for a Critics Choice Award in the category of Best Drama. That no one on the show was nominated in any of the acting categories is at once a scandal and (big sigh) completely unsurprising to those of us who watch SF or fantasy-based TV. I suppose you could make the argument that, in terms of who you’d nominate—where’d you begin? But that Sean Bean didn’t even get a nod is just frustrating and annoying.

Next week: remember the moments of “OMFG!” in this episode and the last? You ain’t seen nothing yet.

Game of Thrones, Episode 1.07: "You Win or you Die"

2011-06-01T19:52:00.008-02:30

Hi everyone, and welcome to the seventh installment of the Chris & Nikki Game of Thrones co-blogging project, where in we discuss each episode as they air—Nikki from the perspective a GoT n00b, and yours true as someone who has been reading the books since A Game of Thrones was in hardcover.

So without further ado: episode seven! Wherein we begin to understand the stakes this the aforementioned game where thrones are sort of a prize or something …

Chris: So, remember a few posts ago when I asked you whom you would be more inclined to trust, Littlefinger or Varys? It was sort of the end of this episode I was thinking about. Hee.

So: lots of great stuff in this episode, but I want to address what I think is the series’ first real misstep: Littlefinger’s tutoring of the whores. First: Roz is in King’s Landing ALREADY? That seems like a pretty fast trip, considering it took the king and his retinue a month to get to Winterfell. And I suppose it was inevitable that, once they decided they wanted to keep her character around, she would end up working in one of Littlefinger’s brothels. I’m not entirely sure why they’ve decided to make her a relatively prominent character. There is one possibility that I won’t voice, as it would be spoilery … but for the moment she seems to be there for the purpose of upping the skin factor. And it’s not that she isn’t nice to look at, but it seems a bit gratuitous.

But really, all that’s neither here nor there. Littlefinger’s little soliloquy provided an interesting window into his character, but it came across to me as totally contrived. For one thing, does Petyr Baelish strike you as such a micromanager that he would deign to give his prostitutes lessons? Or to make such revelations about himself to them? One of the brilliant things about Littlefinger’s character is he keeps so much buttoned up that you’re always guessing about his motivations and ambitions. I felt at the end as if the writers thought they needed something to make his ultimate betrayal of Ned more comprehensible, which to my mind is a rare moment of them not trusting their audience.

That being said: the plot thickens! We finally meet the mighty Tywin Lannister! The King is gored by a boar! Jon Snow will be a steward! His direwolf finally gets a name (oh, and finds a human hand)! Jorah saves Daenerys from being poisoned! Drogo promises to give her the Iron Throne! And Ned Stark TOTALLY FAILS to save the realm from Cersei and her bastard brood!

So much goodness to talk about. Where do you want to start, Nikki?

Nikki: I’d say you’ve covered everything beautifully! So for next week’s blog post…

Haha… Okay, seriously, I enjoyed this episode, although I found it a little bit slow at parts, until the very end (whereupon I sat up bolt upright, hands over my mouth, and just kept saying, “I KNEW IT!!”) The next day I saw a few posts talking about what an idiot Ned Stark was – “Baelish says ‘don’t trust me’ and gives you every indication he’s going to stab you in the back… and you trust him anyway. Are you really that stupid?” but I think that Littlefinger’s betrayal was brilliant, because it showed just how slippery he was, but also what a great actor ~~Mayor Carcetti~~ Gillen is. First, there was always something a little weaselly about the guy – he seems to goad Sansa with the story of the Mountain and the Hound, telling her what horrible trouble she’ll be in if she ever tells the Hound what she knows; he tells Ned there’s no one he can trust; he has backroom meetings with people behind Ned’s back; we know he was in love with Catelyn, and THAT can’t be good. But on the other hand, there seemed to be something more genuine about him – he pointed out all of the listeners to Ned so he’d be aware that he’s being tracked at all times; when Ned made his court declaration last week, Baelish looked at him like he was impressed, as if to say, “THIS is the guy I need to get behind”; he cares about Catelyn, and perhaps that might extend to Ned; he seemed to be helping Ned get to the bottom of what happened to Jon Arryn. But in the end, it was for his own means… he used Ned, knowing that Ned sees the world as black and white only, right and wrong, whereas Baelish knows it’s actually several shades of grey. He knew he could easily take advantage of Ned’s morals to push him to a point where he aligns himself against the Lannisters, and then Baelish could betray him. What Baelish hopes to get out of it ultimately is unclear, but I can’t wait to see what happens next week.

Can I just pause to say the sight of Joffrey on the throne made me throw up a little? UGH.

I’d like to talk about the Drogo scene. Wow, talk about an actor being kept quiet for six episodes and finally commanding a really long scene in the seventh! I didn’t know he had it in him. And for someone who is as obsessed with words as I am, I was thrilled to see all those subtitles. I’ve been picturing the name of the queen as “Calisi” for so many episodes, and when he finally said, “Khalisi” a light went on, and I realized it was meant to be a derivative of Khal, which must mean King (I hadn’t caught that earlier; I just thought that was his name), and he referred to his son as Khalasar, which must be a further derivative, either for son of a king or just prince. Loved that.

But wow, talk about declaration. After his long speech I looked at my husband and said, “So… how come YOU have never offered to rape entire villages of women and murder their children in my name? Sheesh…” I couldn’t take my eyes off Daenerys’s face throughout this scene… rather than looking terrified or disgusted, she looked serene, as if flattered by this declaration of his. As you said last week, she is definitely no longer a child.

Chris: Heh. Yeah, you kind of now imagine the writers soothing Jason Momoa, who plays Drogo, saying “Don’t worry. We have a totally kickass scene for you coming up.” Two things kept running through my mind as I watched that scene: (1) that the Dothraki have thus far been something of a conflation of Mongol warriors and plains Indians, but here we get a little bit of Maori sprinkled in. Seriously, by the end of it, it looked like he was dancing the Haka. (2) Perhaps this was a bit of a rehearsal for the upcoming Conan the Barbarian reboot, which stars Jason Momoa in the title role? I kept waiting for “Crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and hear the lamentation of their women” to show up in his incantation.

Yeah. Not a good scene for anyone insecure in their masculinity to watch. ;-)

I loved the subtitles in this one … especially the moment when Dany is trying to convince Drogo to invade Westeros, saying “There are many dirts across the sea,” and he corrects her, saying “Lands—many lands across the sea.” Hee. It’s such a brilliant little moment—blink and you miss it, but it’s that kind of attention to detail that makes the writing so good.

To be fair to Littlefinger (which is more than he deserves), I think the suggestion is there that if Ned accepted his advice to swallow his honour and crown Joffrey, wed Sansa to him, and later down the road eliminate Stannis and crown Renly, that Littlefinger would have kept faith. But of course Ned simply isn’t capable of such scheming. The point was made several times throughout this episode that the entire concept of what we could call divine right is bullshit—as Jorah tells Daenerys, Aegon the Conqueror did not claim the throne of Westeros because he had the best claim, but because he had might enough to do it (and dragons). Renly makes the same point to Ned—that Robert’s rebellion was not about right but might. And finally, Littlefinger says it most plainly when he points out that his plan would not be treason if they win.

This is one of the things I love about GoT, both the books and the series—in a Tolkien-esque universe, Ned Stark would be the Aragorn figure (notwithstanding his wonderful portrayal of Boromir), whose rigid and unyielding honor wins out in the end. But in King’s Landing, it merely makes him a stationary object for the likes of Littlefinger and Cersei to navigate easily around. GRRM was famously dubbed the “American Tolkien,” the highest praise one can give a fantasy author; but really, this narrative has far more in common with Shakespeare’s history plays.

And yes—the sight of Joffrey on the throne, especially when he petulantly screams “KILL HIM!” is really rather vomit-inducing. And I thought it was bad in the novel. Ugh.

Though I must say that one moment I loved is just how distraught Joffrey looks when he’s at his father’s deathbed—it’s obvious here that he worships him, which is something we imagine must eat at Cersei to no end. He doesn’t seem to spend much time in mourning, mind you, but it’s a lovely cruel irony to Cersei and Jaime that their son identifies with the lout they both loathe so much.

And speaking of Jaime … what did you think of the opening sequence in the Lannister camp?

Nikki: Oh, that opening. I was absolutely fascinated by it. First, I didn’t get right away that that was Tywin… it took me a few moments before I realized, “Wait, the guy who’s skinning the animal is his father!” but that was probably because I couldn’t take my eyes off him skinning the animal. Partly because I thought it was just a brilliant introduction to this character, the way he so deftly does it (I saw him as a king figure and typically you wouldn’t see a leader doing the dirty work, but it would appear this guy likes to do these things himself and has been doing it his entire life) but also, I think that was a real animal. Usually they would use some sort of model or something, but that would have been a hugely expensive undertaking, and I was imagining how they had trained the actor to skin the animal with such mastery.

So yeah, I had to watch that scene again just to hear what they were saying! I hope I wasn’t the only one who was watching that animal-skinning over everything else. But yes, Tywin was fantastic. It’ll be interesting for me if/when we actually see Tywin and Tyrion together. We’ve seen Tyrion with his brother and sister (can I just say not seeing Tyrion at all this week was disappointing? I think that confirms he’s my favourite) but he’s mentioned on a couple of occasions how let down his father was when he discovered his son was a dwarf. I’d like to see Tyrion go head to head with him verbally… but also I’d be interested to see if his father may be the one person who disarms him. I see their relationship as being closer to the one Sam has with his father than anything else.

Speaking of which, talk about a shocker when Jon doesn’t end up being a Ranger like he thought he would be. Do you think Sam is right, and that he’s been put in a position where he could ultimately take over? Of course, I ask that not knowing if it’s an answer you already know…

And in addition to that question, I’ll ask about the King’s death. Was that as big a surprise in the book as it was for me to see on the show? The King is such a big, overwhelming character, and I was shocked to see him killed off so early in the series. But then again, he’s more of a catalyst of events – he’s that bridge between a past of glory and the present, filled with stasis. He’s a go-nowhere drunk, and despite being such a powerful character up to now, his purpose has been mostly to illuminate Ned’s morals in contrast and make us question what a king should be. He’s important because of what he’s not – he’s not moral, he’s not a good king, he’s not a loving husband, he’s not ambitious, and he’s not the father of any of his children. The only thing he was, was Ned’s friend. But even that wavered at the end when Ned saw him for what he was.

Chris: I was, to be honest, a little ambivalent about Tywin for the simple reason that my mental image of him in the books is totally different. That being said, Charles Dance’s take on the character is totally compelling, and the deer-skinning scene won me over on the rewatch. I actually think it’s a fairly clever little gambit on the writers’ part, because as a culture we’ve become at once completely divorced from such simple realities as the food we eat and at the same time desensitized to screen violence. The familiarity with violence, I want to suggest, is not unlike King Robert’s love of killing things and his concomitant reluctance to really deal with the consequences of violence. Tywin’s deer-skinning thus becomes a shrewd conceit. Unless we hunt or work at a slaughterhouse, there’s little mental connection between the cute lamb at the petting zoo and the rack of lamb crusted with herbs. And as one of the wealthy elite of Westeros, Tywin need not do his own dressing of the deer; that we’re introduced to him elbow-deep in blood suggests, as you say, that this is a character with few illusions and no tolerance for those who won’t face the unpleasant realities of ruling.

Interestingly, this aligns Tywin with Ned against Robert—don’t forget, one of our first encounters with Ned was his execution of the deserter, based on the principle that he who passes the sentence should swing the sword. He later castigates Robert on that point when Robert caves to Cersei on the issue of killing Sansa’s direwolf. Robert likes to kill things, but doesn’t care to clean up the aftermath.

I will be mum on Jon Snow’s future, for the sake of spoilers.

Robert’s death was a big surprise for me when I first read the novel, though now in hindsight it seems pretty inevitable. You’re absolutely right when you say he’s essentially an agent of stasis—him and Cersei together, really, keeping the realm steady in their uneasy marriage. For the game of thrones to start in earnest, that stasis has to shatter.

To return to Vaes Dothrak, what did you think of Jorah in this episode? He’d been revealed to us as an informer and a spy, sending information about Daenerys and Viserys to Varys, and here we see that he has won his heart’s desire—a royal pardon and the freedom to return home. Which of course raises his suspicions about the wineseller, but by intervening and saving Daenerys, he pretty much irrevocably yokes his fate to hers.

Nikki: This was definitely an episode about betrayal, and that revelation about Jorah was something that I didn’t quite understand the first time through… why was he being given a pardon? What the heck is going on? I had to watch it more than once to get that. Where Littlefinger was suspicious because of the way he actually instilled the suspicion in Ned on purpose (almost as a ploy… “I’m not the guy you should trust, you know… and me saying that pretty much means I’m the only one you CAN trust”) whereas Jorah was under my radar the entire time. The way he stood in Viserys’s way; his protectiveness around Dany; the way he’s helped her assimilate herself into the Dothraki; his sympathies for the Dothraki clan and innate understanding of everything they stand for… there was just something so trustworthy about him, and I think it’s clear, as you say, that that stems from a genuine affection for Dany. While he was sending secrets, he actually cared for her, I think.

Jorah is actually the one character I’d like to know more about, and I wonder if reading the books could cast more light on him for me? Just a couple of weeks ago my husband said, “So, okay, was he with the Dothraki or with Daenerys and her brother?” And I said, “He was with the Dothraki… no, wait, he was with the Targaryens… no… the Doth—you know, I can’t remember…” but it just didn’t seem to matter. His purpose for me was to offer a narrative to Daenerys and make her more sympathetic to us and to explain the Dothraki, who are the most foreign to us in the episode (I agree with your Maori take, by the way, and actually the very first time we saw Khal Drogo my initial thought was to wonder if the actor was Maori, because he certainly looks it).

So this turn of events was an interesting one for me, because it means Jorah is so much more than just a Johnny the Explainer, he’s a real character who could be the bridge between the Targaryens (I know I’m spelling that wrong, by the way…) and the rest of them.

Only three more episodes to go! I can’t believe the season is almost over, and it feels like it’s just beginning.

Game of Thrones 1.06: "A Golden Crown"

2011-05-26T20:00:00.004-02:30

Nikki: And welcome to Week 6 of the Nikki Stafford/Christopher Lockett rundown of this week’s instalment of Game of Thrones. I’m Nikki Stafford (excitedly waving from my desk), your TV guide of a select few shows over here at Nik at Nite, and that is Christopher Lockett (sagely nodding while sipping his scotch) over there at An Ontarian in Newfoundland. Together we’ll discuss the show with me talking about it as a newbie to the world of George RR Martin, and Chris as the longtime fan of the books.

Well, let’s start at the end of this episode, with a scene that most viewers will never forget: Viserys finally getting his golden crown. I LOVE this scene, even though it’s terrifying and gory and graphic, but how often do you see a truly vile character really get his these days? Viserys was worse than usual in this episode, mostly because he went from Mr. All That to realizing that maybe he’s really not. He watches Daenerys as she eats the horse heart (ew), and is held aloft before her adoring followers... and that’s when he realizes, oh my GOD she has adoring followers, and he has none. “Who can rule without wealth or fear or love?” he asks as he decides to make a break for it. The Dothraki aren’t a people who will follow his rule as his army, and so instead he decides to steal the only valuable thing Daenerys has – her dragon eggs – and get another army (one that would no doubt eventually rise up against the Dothraki).

We hear all sorts of predictions of what Daenerys’s son will be like, and at the end of the episode, she says bluntly that Viserys couldn’t have been the Dragon, because a Dragon can’t be hurt by fire. So, does that make her the Dragon? Perhaps her son? Chris, I was interested in what the scope of the books is when it got to this scene. Are we only watching the very beginning of a very long saga that will cover decades, or is it still moving along in a methodical pace? Is this just the first generation of the series or will the books continue to follow these people? (Now, try to answer THAT one without spoilers!) ;)

Chris: The heart-eating scene is brilliant, not least because the first shot of Emilia Clarke, with the blood on her mouth and her slightly manic grin, makes her look like a very sexy zombie. Or some kind of flesh-eating succubus. Either way, that whole sequence was beautifully done, and manages to be faithful to the novel while conflating the sequence with Viserys’ realization of his isolation (well observed, by the way). Ser Jorah was great in this episode, especially in terms of his quiet yet fraught dignity when he faces down the larcenous Viserys with the dragon eggs.

I can be relatively spoiler-free when I say that over the first four books, GRRM isn’t doing any long-term, multigenerational things. In fact from the start of A Game of Thrones to the end of A Feast for Crows (which I am just now in the process of rereading—not unpredictably, rereading GoT has sucked me back into the other books ... and now I have to wait until July for book five! Wah!), only about two or three years elapse. Now, GRRM has said some cryptic things about the timeline of A Dance with Dragons, so this may change. But as of now, we’re still in the thick of it with all the characters you know and love from GoT. Well, most of them. ;-)

And there is simply nothing I can say about Daenerys’ child that wouldn’t be spoilery. So you’ll just have to wait and see.

Can I add here that though this was an AMAZING episode, with all sorts of cool and mind-blowing moments that we’ll undoubtedly get to, that my hands down favourite moment was Arya’s look of horror at Sansa’s fairy-tale dream about her and Joffrey, and her appalled exclamation “Seven hells!” Heh. I don’t know where they found Maisie Williams, but that young actress is superlatively good. Arya is one of the best characters in the novels—if not in fact the best, which is saying a lot—and I was concerned that they wouldn’t be able to find a child actor who could do her justice. And not only is she doing her justice, she is going beyond and making Arya her own ... something few adult actors can do with a complex, nuanced character adapted from a novel. It’s a shame she gets killed by the sassy robot at the end of book one.

OK, I was lying about that last bit. Seven hells. Heh.

Nikki: You are evil. I should pour YOU a golden crown. ;) I agree, Arya is fantastic. In fact, in a complete aside, our family got a new female kitten this week and were on the hunt for a name, and a friend who has been reading these blog posts suggested Arya. I didn’t go with it, but I thought it was a great suggestion, especially her connection with cats. That scene with her sister is hilarious... the woman with Sansa notices she’s changed her hair style and seems quite happy to be integrated into the world of the Lannisters, and she’s right. Do you sympathize with Sansa, or do you find her rather annoying? I wonder if you get more of her own thoughts in the books... in the show, there are times when I think she deserves Joffrey. I did absolutely adore the line, “I don’t want someone brave and gentle and strong. I want him!” Hahahahaha... that’s like saying, “I don’t want to be with someone who’s smart and good-looking. I’m happy with you.”

Speaking of great lines, check out the back and forth between Cersei and Robert after he slaps her across the face:

Cersei: I shall wear this like a badge of honour.
Robert: Wear it in silence, or I’ll honour you again.

Yikes! As we’ve discussed before, I really do think the king is a washed-up, ineffectual ass, and despite Cersei’s Lady Macbeth tendencies and general miserable nature, I don’t blame her given the husband she’s had to be with all these years. Ned is a much more effective ruler in that scene where he actually holds court and DOES something when a civilian comes before the council with a problem. I loved that scene, and you could tell Littlefinger was relishing the fact he actually got to write down something interesting for a change.

Ned seems to be coming to the realization that his old friend is incompetent as well, which could be why he makes such a drastic ruling in that scene. Of course, from the conversation he has with Sansa, he begins to put things together and realizes that while the Baratheons all have hair of black, his “children,” as the old Brady Bunch song used to say, “Have hair of gold, like their mother, the youngest one a douche.” (I could be remembering that song differently.) That was a big moment. I can’t wait to see what he does with this information.

Chris: Sansa is one of the key POV characters throughout the books, and her development is quite nicely done. She is irritating for the balance of book one, especially when seen from someone else’s perspective. She’s still in the irritating phase in the series, but if they hold true to the book, she’ll get substantially more sympathetic by the end.

On rewatching the episode this morning, I caught the little smile that Ned and Arya share at Sansa’s oblivious comment about Joffrey. Arya is so totally her father’s daughter, even more so than in the novels.

And yes, there were some amazing lines in this episode. The one you quote between Robert and Cersei is actually taken verbatim from the novel, as is his threat to make Jaime Lannister Hand if Ned throws it in his face again. Among my other favourite lines were Tyrion’s confession about jerking off into the turtle stew, “Which I do believe my sister ate. At least, I hope she did,” and his attempts to bribe the gaoler Mord. His first attempt, when he talks about wealth and ownership being an “abstract” thing had me howling, as did his slow, precise “Because you’re a smart man.” Also, Bronn’s word’s after he wins the duel:

LYSA: You don’t fight with honour.
BRONN: No. [indicates where Vardis fell] He did.

But I think my favourite line, and it’s one the writers added themselves, was Syrio’s comment “There is only one god, and his name is Death. And there is only one thing we say to Death: not today!”

One of the great themes running through this episode was the contrast between effective leadership and not. King Robert, we see again and again, is a moral coward—fearless in battle, but quails before any sort of difficult decision. We saw it when Cersei browbeat him into killing Sansa’s direwolf, we saw it in his inability to see reason on the question of the remaining Targaryens, and we saw it when he basically begs Ned to settle the dispute with the Lannisters in such a way that (1) Jaime will never be called to account, and (2) he won’t have to deal with the sticky question of standing up to a man whom he owes a vast amount of money. It sort of goes without saying that if he’d been sitting the throne when the despoiled peasants petitioned him, he’d have fobbed them off with vague promises. Ned’s condemnation of the Mountain and Tywin Lannister was ballsy.

Across the narrow sea, we see a similar contrast between Viserys and Daenerys. I think your reading of those scenes is spot-on. Viserys continues his downward spiral unto death, but we see Dany maturing and, as Jorah observes, becoming more queenly. Is it just me, or does it seem that Emilia Clarke has lost some weight? In her face, at any rate—she looks older, leaner, as if she’s lost her baby fat. And she is more poised now. The look in her eye when she tells Viserys that Drogo will give him his golden crown is both heartbreaking and chilling. She knows Drogo’s intent right away even as Viserys is cheerfully oblivious, but does not flinch from it.

Nikki: Absolutely. There is a hardness in her face, but also a determination that she’s doing the right thing. And, at the same time, you can tell this is difficult. He may be an ass, but he’s also her brother. However, he’s an interloper who claims to be the Dragon, when he’s not. Back in the fourth episode a couple of weeks ago, Ser Jorah tells her that her other brother was the last dragon, not Viserys, and so in this moment she has this look like, “Fine. You’re the real dragon? Prove it. If you are, this won’t hurt a bit.” But she knows if it DOES kill him, he died a charlatan and a fraud, and the world’s better off without him. Amazing scene. Probably the most vividly memorable of them all (except for the horse being decapitated... that still gives me the heebs).

The scene of Tyrion’s champion fighting the other man is excellent, and worthy of mentioning that when HBO sends out the screeners, they’re not always complete. Often there will be a scene where you can see flashing in the corner, “Temporary audio” or “Temporary VFX” and it’s usually very minor, like the wind whipping around the Wall that’s not as harrowing as it will ultimately become. But in the Tyrion scene, when the queen’s sister’s champion is bested, he fell through the hole and sort of laid there, flailing his arms while a green screen appeared behind him and “Temporary VFX” flashed in the corner. My husband and I were laughing, and we got the gist even if we didn’t quite see what happened, so I was looking forward to seeing the drop for reals this time.

Tyrion’s confession is brilliant, as you say. As are his discussions with the aptly-named “Mort.” (I wondered how long it would take for Mort to get clunked on the head after Tyrion leaves the castle so someone else could take his purse.) As Tyrion marched out, my husband and I said in unison, “A Lannister always pays his debts.” LOVE it.

Did you notice that the man who steps up as Tyrion’s champion is actually the same guy who was at the inn when Tyrion was captured by Catelyn? I happened to be rewatching the fourth episode again this week with my father, and sure enough, the champion is the one who, when Tyrion walks in and demands a room, clinking his gold piece on the tables, holds up his hand and says, “You can have my room.” Strange that the same person has stepped up twice to help out Tyrion when it was needed. I never would have noticed that if I hadn’t gone back to see the earlier ep.

My last question to you is, we’ve now twice seen Bran’s strange dream of the three-eyed raven. I guess you can’t really say what it is without spoilage, but is that dream also in the books?

Chris: I hadn’t noticed that Tyrion’s champion—Bronn—was that same man. I looked for him later when they were fighting on the way to the Eyrie, because Bronn becomes a fairly significant character as the novels go on. He’s a great character, actually, doubly because he never loses his simple mercenary pragmatism. He fights for Tyrion here because he knows he’ll be well paid, and he stays by Tyrion’s side for a long time for the same reasons. But he’s no fool for honour, and—mild spoiler—when the time comes in book three, he refuses to stand for the Imp.

There are a number of things we haven’t yet discussed, and since you’ve left the last comment to me, I think I’ll run through them before answering your question about Bran.

Robert’s admission that he never loved his brothers, and that Ned was the brother he chose … oh, so heartbreaking. Poor Robert. Poor stupid, cowardly, oblivious Robert. You should have made Ned your Hand so long ago.
Catelyn didn’t have much to do in this episode, but I have to give her credit for some great face-acting throughout Tyrion’s “confession”—in particular, the look she gives her batshit sister when she realizes they’ve all been played by him.
Syrio! I love Syrio.
The scene between Joffrey and Sansa was utterly cringe-inducing. Seeing him playing the gracious prince (at the behest of his mother, no doubt) and Sansa’s buying of the act, was painful to watch. So much so that on my re-watch, I fast-forwarded through it. Seven hells, indeed.
King Robert’s excruciating monologue about the good old days, and how simpler it all was. A bit heavy-handed, perhaps, but it did a nice job of showing the fissures between him and Renly, and also set up a necessary plot point.
I love love love how the penny drops for Ned. The first part, when Sansa points out that Joffrey is nothing like Robert, is exactly how it happens in the novel. Ned’s perusal of the “ponderous tome” is implied in the novel, but not depicted. Watching him realize Jaime and Cersei’s incest is brilliant. Can’t wait for the next instalment.

They’ve modified the dreams somewhat, but the three-eyed raven is quite prevalent in the books. I can’t really say why here without being REALLY spoilery, aside from saying that Bran becomes an increasingly important and central character as the books go on. And the three-eyed raven (and wolf with wings, heh) is quite prevalent.

Game of Thrones Episode 1.05 -- "The Wolf and the Lion"

2011-05-19T16:30:00.011-02:30

Hi everyone, and welcome to installment five of the Game of Thrones co-blogging project, wherein I write as the GRRM veteran, and Nikki Stafford writes as one who has not read the books. I think it's safe to say that this most recent episode was a barn-burner, and we're sorry this week's post is a day later than usual. Nikki had to rush her direwolf to the vet -- poor thing ate a Lannister, and choked on the smugness.

*crickets*

Anyhoo, without further ado ...

Chris: Before I start, I thought I should offer a “what they changed” list for today, as there was a lot of deviation from the novel in this episode … almost always in intriguing and interesting ways.

What They Changed / Added

• Ned’s conversation with Barristan Selmy. Well, it’s broadly the same as it unfolds in the novel—starting with their discussion over Ser Hugh’s body, and ending with Barristan stating the King’s plan to take part in the joust (though in the novel it’s not the joust, it’s the melee). What’s interesting here is the establishment of Barristan’s bona fides as a knight—the bit where Ned says he’s happy they had not met in battle is added.
• Bran’s geography lesson. This was a neat little way to educate the audience about the geography of Westeros and its noble houses. Interesting that Bran cannot recall the Lannister family motto (which is, incidentally, “Hear Me Roar!”). Is this part of his mental block about how he fell?
• Theon and Rosie. The red-haired prostitute of Winterfell is having an interesting half-life on the show, considering she does not appear in the novel. I can’t decide whether this is HBO upping the skin factor (there was a lot of it in this episode), or using her as a means to give voice to the exploited and subjugated classes of Westeros. Though I suppose it doesn’t have to be mutually exclusive.
• Varys and Littlefinger. This conversation is entirely invented, though it is more or less implicit in the novel—Varys and Petyr are the two most devious characters in the books. I liked this exchange—it was sort of like the spy’s version of the pissing contest, seeing who knows more about the other. There has been the suggestion that they work together—such as when Varys informs Littlefinger of Catelyn’s arrive in King’s Landing, and shows up at the brothel—but this scene makes very clear that not only don’t they trust each other, they may well be enemies.
• No Brynden Tully! One of my favourite secondary characters in the novels has been left out—Brynden “Blackfish” Tully, Catelyn’s gruff uncle, who is in the service of her sister. Perhaps he will show up later, but I was looking forward to seeing him in this episode.
• Loras and Renly! There is the faintest suggestion in the novels that Robert’s brother and the Knight of Flowers are lovers, faint enough that it only occurred to me on later rereadings of the books. But there is nothing explicit. Well, so much for subtlety here—not only are they obviously lovers, but Loras is goading Renly to jockey for the crown. And all I’ll say on that point for the benefit of the other GRRM geeks reading this … veeeeerrrrrry interesting.
• The conversation between Robert and Cersei. I loved this, even though it goes farther toward making Cersei a more sympathetic character. His description of the state of the realm is lovely.
• The confrontation between Ned and Jaime. Almost spot-on, except that in the novel Ned is injured when his horse falls on top of him, and there is no swordfight between him and Jaime. In the novel, we never get a glimpse of Ned actually fighting—we assume he knows what he is doing with a sword, but no actual evidence, whereas Jaime’s prowess is constantly mentioned. So, interesting that they show us here that Ned can hold his own against the Kingslayer … until he is stabbed in the leg.

OK, so there we are. Nikki: what did you think of episode five? Two of our main storylines were simply ignored, as we don’t see the Wall or Daenerys.

Nikki: Thanks for that list, Chris! You covered off many of my questions right there; as I watched the Bran geography lesson, I immediately wondered if that was a way to sum up a lot of history in one quick scene. Great stuff.

And yes, I noticed the complete lack of Daenerys and the Dothraki. I missed her for sure. I enjoyed this episode a lot, but it was by far the goriest. From the joust in the beginning and what the Mountain does to his horse (gah!!) to the ambush on Catelyn’s group and Tyrion smashing the attacker’s head repeatedly with a shield (gyaaahh!!), to the fight at the end between Jaime and Ned’s group, complete with a dagger in the eye socket (nnnggggaayahhh) it was one cringeworthy episode. Definitely the one where you realize this ain’t for the squeamish. Luckily, despite my noisemaking throughout (which pretty much echoed what I wrote there), I thought it was pretty amazing.

But I really must begin by asking you about Catelyn’s sister… whose name escapes me (of course). That woman gave me the heebs from the moment her 10-year-old (or older?) son stopped breastfeeding momentarily to look up. Good god. I’m a big proponent of breastfeeding, but… :::shudder::: And that kid does not appear to be playing with a full deck. Have you seen the episode of 30 Rock where Paul Reubens plays the inbred prince? Yep. He reminded me of THAT guy.

Her castle was glorious in its frightworthiness, though. Did it live up to the description in the book? And is she as loopy in the book as she is on the show?

Chris: Actually, believe it or not, they’ve downplayed Lysa’s batshit insanity a little bit. Not much, mind you—but still. I think the boy is supposed to be six years old in the novel. If you want a comparison, here’s a representative passage from the novel, from Catelyn’s POV:

‘Quiet!’ Lysa snapped at her. ‘You’re scaring the boy.’ Little Robert took a quick peek over his shoulder at Catelyn and began to tremble. His doll fell to the rushes, and he pressed himself against his mother. ‘Don’t be afraid, my sweet baby,’ Lysa whispered. ‘Mother’s here, nothing will hurt you.’ She opened her robe and drew out a pale, heavy breast, tipped with red. The boy grabbed for it eagerly, his face buried against her chest, and began to suck. Lysa stroked his hair. Catelyn was at a loss for words.

The little Lord Robert actually gets ever creepier as the novels go on, as does his mother.

The Eyrie—Lysa’s castle—I was so-so on. I thought the interior was brilliantly done, as was Tyrion’s cell. But our first view of it from a distance was the first time the series has disappointed me with its mise-en-scene—it looked pretty fake.

A friend of mine who has been watching the episodes on torrent recently told me that in the comments on episode four there were complaints about how slow-moving the series has been—that it wasn’t like a fantasy novel at all. I think this episode puts those complaints to rest. All of the swordplay and violence we’ve been waiting for sort of just comes all at once here, no? And if the series keeps faith with the books, this is just the tip of the iceberg. Next week’s episode is titled “A Golden Crown”—and all I’ll say to the n00bs is: (1) We’ll be seeing Daenerys and the Dothraki again, and (2) Gah!

I think my favourite part of the episode was the war of words between Littlefinger and Varys. Knowing what I do of their characters, I have a much better sense of who is plotting what, and where their respective loyalties lie. What did you make of that exchange, Nikki? If you had to trust one of them, whom would it be?

Nikki: That passage from the book made me shudder. Eep.

I’m surprised to hear the criticism. The people who would complain that these episodes are slow-moving are probably the same ones who said they just didn’t “get” The Wire. It’s too bad. (And having seen next week’s episode, I second your “Gah!” and can tell everyone it’s probably my favourite episode of the six.)

I, too, was intrigued by the scene between those two, because I don’t trust either one of them. They’re both underhanded and seem to be playing Ned in one way or the other, and both actors have this way of looking at him in a sidelong glance that makes you think they’re up to something. So when they go head to head… it was almost as if they were both lying, both bluffing in this game of chess they’re playing, tiptoeing around the issue and daring the other one to go further than he has already gone. So you’ve stumped me with that question. If I had to choose one of them, I might choose Baelish, because there are moments of humanity in him, especially when he talks to Catelyn. I haven’t seen anything similar in Varys yet. But I simply don’t understand why they’re offering to help Ned, and what could be gained by doing so.

Are we to assume that Jon Arryn was trying to round up the king’s bastards to prove they were all dark-haired, as opposed to the platinum-blond non heirs that are roaming the castle right now as his children? Presumably the queen’s children are ones she’s had by Jaime, and not Robert. But what’s to be gained by this? I’m intrigued by what Ned will put together here… and why Baelish is leading him down that path.

Speaking of the king and queen, how about that scene between the two of them? There are times where the king is absolutely loathsome, and I wonder if he’s very different from the man that Ned once knew? Becoming a king has not only made him too fat, but he’s excessive in everything and seems quite ineffectual as a king. He’s heartless to Cersei in this scene as she reminisces with him over their sham of a marriage. He tells her that nothing has filled the hole that Ned’s sister left behind, and she admits that she actually felt something for him once and asks if there’d ever been a single moment in their marriage where he felt the same. “No,” he declares after a thoughtful pause, followed by, “Does that make you feel better or worse?” She replies, “I don’t feel anything.” The conversation was shocking and devastating to watch.

Was the conversation the same in the book? It also made me wonder about the relationship with Jaime: she may trust him and be having an affair with him, but I wonder if that weighs on her? Could someone be truly happy being in a sexual relationship with her brother? Isn’t there a part of her that is in anguish that this is the only love she can find? Is he using her in some way? He doesn’t seem to love her so much as possess her.

Chris: The conversation between the king and queen was quite well done, I thought—and it’s not actually in the book. Every chapter is from a particular character’s point of view, and we don’t have that from either Robert or Cersei—so while the conversation might have happened, we could never know (ditto for the Varys/Littlefinger exchange). However hurtful Robert and Cersei have been to one another, there was a sense of understanding between them in this scene, however grudging or underlined with malice. We don’t get that in the book—the only feelings between them are Robert’s contempt for Cersei and her loathing of Robert.

The sexual relationship between Jaime and Cersei is played somewhat more ambivalently in the series, at least on Cersei’s part. In the novels, it is more of a long-standing thing—basically since even before they knew what they were doing, they were together sexually. Though they are not of one mind: Jaime is utterly devoted to Cersei, and is oddly faithful to her … but there is the sense that she is more opportunistic, and more concerned with her own power and ambition. That’s one of the reasons I loved Jaime’s chilling promise to kill everyone but him and her—that captured his ruthless, single- minded devotion perfectly. He would be perfectly happy having the world know about them, and damn the consequences. Cersei, conversely, it rather more circumspect.

I said something to this effect in my first post on GoT, but I have to imagine it’s the Littlefingers and Varyses, much more than the jousting, swordplay, and other staples of fantasy, that drew HBO to GRRM’s books. This goes to those who find the series boring, you are probably absolutely right to observe, are the same as those who just couldn’t get into The Wire. HBO certainly does not stint on giving us violence, or graphic sex and nudity, but the commonalty between its best shows is this degree of complexity and the frequent preoccupation with power. The scheming and plotting in King’s Landing echoes that which we see between the prisoner factions in Oz, the mob politics of The Sopranos, and the nascent democracy of Deadwood. As we see with such a spectacularly bad series as Spartacus, the blood and sex is easy to do. But without good, intelligent writing, it collapses on itself.

Nikki: So well put. I agree that writing is king on HBO. I think going hand-in-hand with that is the acting. The ensemble cast is so well put together on this show – they work well together, there’s chemistry where there needs to be, and the acting is absolutely superb. I have to point out Dinklage again: the look on his face when he sees Catelyn’s sister (and her tiny weirdo) is priceless. And when she accuses him of killing the hand of the king, he says, “Oh! Did I kill him, too? I’ve been a VERY busy man.” I just love Tyrion.

Even the secondary characters are superb. That scene of the king’s council flatly telling Ned how they need to put the Targaryens down is superb, with Littlefinger using the analogy of slicing a woman’s throat without a second thought, Robert simply raging against their family, Varys quietly agreeing with everyone, and Ned standing there in utter shock at the madness of it all. I loved that scene.

It’s interesting that HBO could take a book that, by your description, sounds like it’s entirely in first person from various points of view, and turns it into an objective, third-person narrative. Amazing. Yes, the writer is definitely king.

Chris:Just to clarify: the character POVs in GRRM’s books are third-person limited, not first person; but that doesn’t take away from your observation that the writers’ accomplishment is tremendous.

Speaking of the writers, it’s probably high time we gave them a shout-out: D.B. Weiss and David Benioff, who are responsible for having brought this to the small screen to start with, have done the lion’s share of the work on this series in terms of the writing. Looking at their resumes on IMDb.com, one wouldn’t have predicted it: Benioff has graced us with such brilliant screenplays as X-Men Origins: Wolverine and Troy (though also Brothers and The 25th Hour, which I can’t comment on, not having seen them), and Weiss’ only credit for anything is Game of Thrones. But even if everything they do from this point on is shite, they will have my eternal respect for this series. They have managed at once to be faithful to the source material, to deftly incorporate GRRM’s own dialogue at key points, and augment the narrative with scenes of their own invention that work seamlessly.

We should also note that episode eight, “The Pointy End,” is written by GRRM himself—so it will be interesting to see how the novelist’s episode compares to those of his adaptors.

And with episode five, we are also at the halfway point in season one: five down, five to go, and I have to say it has thus far exceeded my expectations. For the final word, Nikki, what are your thoughts as we sit at the Ides of Game of Thrones?

Nikki: Only that I’m enjoying co-blogging with you immensely. This is fun!

Thanks for the shout-out for Benioff and Weiss… I wonder if Benioff’s background as a novelist has helped him envision how a novel could be brought to the screen? I think they’ve done a helluva job. I was shocked when I first saw this season would only be 10 episodes (I was hoping for the usual HBO 13) but so far they’re doing a brilliant job in truncating such a vast book into 10 hours.

I can’t wait for reader reactions to this Sunday’s episode… it was the last of the episodes that HBO sent to me in advance, and it’s a shocker. Enjoy!

Game of Thrones, Ep 4: “Cripples, Bastards, and Broken Things”

2011-05-13T15:21:00.009-02:30

OK, a bit of weirdness -- both Nikki's and my posts that went up last Saturday disappeared. We have no idea why, aside from the fact that Blogger sometimes sucks. So here is mine again, and I know Nikki's will be up again shortly on her site. Unfortunately, all comments have been lost, so please -- comment again!

Hi all—welcome to instalment four of the Game of Thrones parallel blogging project, in which my good friend Nikki and I react and respond to the series, she as a GRRM n00b and yours truly as a long-suffering GRRM devotee.

Though I’m not nearly as long-suffering or as devoted as a certain subset of GRRM’s fans, some of whom have apparently suffered psychotic breaks in response to how long he’s taken to produce book five, A Dance With Dragons. This New Yorker article is pretty eye-opening ... the vitriol the poor guy has had to deal with is truly shocking. And speaking as someone whose own writing productivity tends toward the glacial, I really feel for the guy. Anyway, if you are so inclined, read the article ... and please feel free to comment on it. I mean ... I love the Ice & Fire series, and have been increasingly impatient to read the next one, but I’m not about to turn around and start calling the man names. Lighten up, people ...

At any rate. This week Nikki and I are trying a different format, so let us know if you like this conversational style better.

Nikki: And Game of Thrones knocks another one out of the park with this week’s stellar instalment. Chris and I were both talking last week about how much information was jammed into episode 3, and how that episode was a bit of a welcome lull in the action to stop, go back, and fill in a lot of backstory on several characters. This week we take that information we now know... and add more. There were many new scenes of exposition, but these seemed more anecdotal and less integral to the history of the series. They were told with thrilling suspense, and I couldn’t help but wonder time after time if these scenes were taken right from the book or if they were bringing various histories together to convey it to us very quickly. A real standout is Viserys telling the slave girl about the dragon skulls that used to decorate his father’s throne room, with Viserys being understood to be the last of the dragons (I find that hard to believe). This story was fascinating. Do the books go back in time and fill in more details about the dragons themselves? Or was it summed up in this succinct scene in the books as well?

Chris: I’m still somewhat speechless over this last episode. I think you’re spot on, Nikki, in noting that the exposition is more anecdotal—but that imparted more background information and context almost by dint of being anecdotal, which is kind of impressive when you think about it. And while the series is far more compressed in its exposition, this is more or less the way it falls out in the novels. There are no flashbacks or historical sequences per se—there are a few instances of characters reminiscing or dreaming past incidents—but for the most part, we get a sense of history in the books precisely by characters talking, sharing stories, and so on. Now, that may change in A Dance With Dragons, the new novel coming out in July; GRRM has said that the timeline will blow our minds, which has been variously interpreted as meaning that he does go back in time to give us backstory, or possibly just that the various overlapping narratives will make it hard to figure out chronological sequence. Given the nature of the books so far, I’m assuming it’s column B, but we’ll see.

I think my favourite backstory moment was Tyrion’s nasty taunting of Theon Greyjoy. I’ve been wondering when we were going to get to his story: he’s been present at Winterfell this whole time, obviously not one of the Stark children but not exactly a servant, and I was getting a little concerned … thinking that the longer they went without fleshing him out, the more awkward it was going to be when they did. And I needn’t have worried: Tyrion’s lovely little condescending disquisition on Theon’s father’s failed rebellion was beautifully succinct. But then, I know the history there—did you find any of the moments like this confusing or opaque?

Nikki: Great scene choice, because yes, the first time I watched this scene I looked at my husband with a completely puzzled look and said, “Wait... who is he supposed to be?” There had been hints along the way that he wasn’t one of Stark’s sons – I remember when they were passing out the direwolf pups he said something about not being able to have one – but it still wasn’t clear exactly who he was. Even with the explanation it was still a little foggy, but many of the backstories of the secondary characters are pretty difficult to follow. It doesn’t bother or worry me – I figure in time, it’ll all be clearer once we not only know these people better, but their stories begin to converge and/or take on lives of their own.

My favourite anecdote in the episode was Littlefinger’s story of the The Mountain and The Hound. You mentioned last week that you thought the Hound’s face was disappointing, that it should have been far more horrifying than it actually is on the show. Did you continue to think that this week? There’s something very interesting in his face, I think... it’s horrific from one side, normal from the other, and I don’t know if that’s a comment on his personality but it certainly seems so (he comes across as gruff, but not vicious, and I wonder if you actually tried to speak to him on a normal level if he’d respond). I also found some sadness in the way his hair falls on the right side of his head, as if he’s trying to cover up something that simply can’t be covered up. He doesn’t get one of those masks Jack Huston’s character, Richard Harrow, wears in Boardwalk Empire.

This episode had a lot of one-on-one moments, where you simply had two characters in a scene (many scenes have been like that, actually). I LOVED when Daenerys whacked Viserys in the head and threatened him. It’s a moment that turns her story around completely... it began as something almost misogynist and became a very feminist take on this powerful character. Are GRRM’s books as openly feminist as this or have they twisted the story for TV?

Chris: One of the most amazing elements of GRRM’s books is their strong women. The fantasy genre can be pretty regressive sometimes in terms of its representations of women—though to be fair, it has gotten better. But GRRM’s women are remarkable and, if anything, they’re more muted in the series. Though that might just be the natural advantage fiction has over film to provide nuance. And for the record, the scene between Daenerys and Viserys is pretty spot-on to the way it unfolds in the novel.

David Simon once compared the way The Wire unfolded to a Russian novel—where you struggle through the first hundred pages or so, totally at sea in the multiple narratives and huge cast of characters, but after a certain point you stop doing the heavy lifting and instead the story carries you. I always thought that was an excellent description not just of how The Wire worked, but also HBO series generally … and GoT is no exception. At a certain indeterminate point, you just go with it. That may be a disadvantage to all us GRRM geeks … we miss that moment when the struggling to keep up stops and we’re just swept up in the narrative(s).

I find it interesting that they rejigged the story of The Mountain and The Hound to have Littlefinger telling Sansa. In the book, it’s the Hound himself who tells her, and it’s a moment of rare, raw sympathy for that character. What I do love about having the story come from Littlefinger is that you simply don’t know whether to believe him or not. Is this a true story? Or is he telling it to impress Sansa, whom he so creepily compares to her mother? Or is he playing some other inscrutable game?

I agree, the Hound’s scarring looked better in this episode. He still hasn’t been as terrifying as he is in the book, but that might also be a function of how the book unfolds from different characters’ points of view. In the novel, a lot of our impression of the Hound comes by way of Sansa, who in her love of all things unicorny and pretty would be doubly horrified by his disfigurement … and the comparable disfigurement of his character.

What did you think of the bits at the Wall? I think Jon’s confession that he couldn’t bring himself to sleep with Rosie because he was afraid of fathering a bastard was quite well done. Alliser Thorne’s subsequent rant about the dangers they would face was perhaps my least favourite part of the episode …

Nikki: I thought the same thing about Littlefinger’s story... I can’t figure that guy out at all. Was he just trying to spook Sansa when he told her she could never tell the Hound that she knew his story, or was he telling the truth? Similarly I liked the scene when he was pointing out all the spies in the garden to Ned, and I felt like I really couldn’t trust him. But the very point he’s trying to make is that you can trust no one (notice he tells Ned to send his most trusted man to the blacksmith shop, and Ned does send his most trusted man: himself).

In this episode I actually found the Wall moments to be less intriguing than the others; I was looking forward to getting back to King’s Landing every time they were at the Wall, although I thought Thorne’s talk about what the last winter was like was rather harrowing.

One moment that particularly intrigued me in the episode was Ned talking to Arya, who was standing on one foot and trying to become like a cat. He tells her in no uncertain terms that she will marry someone important and will give birth to boys who will be knights and will reign the lands. He tells her this thinking this is what she wants to hear, but it’s actually the sort of thing Sansa aspires to, not Arya, and she says as much, saying that’s not the sort of life she plans to lead as she goes back to the top of the stairs to continue standing on one foot. What was so wonderful about this scene is that it stands in complete contrast to last week’s scene with Joffrey and Cersei. She tells him that he will be king and will rule the land in any way he wants. He listens to the hype and believes every word of it, puffing himself up with such airs that you just want to stick a pin in him and watch him deflate. Like Ned, she states his future as if it’s already set in stone, but while Joffrey goes along with whatever Mommy tells him, Arya has a mind of her own, and she refuses to be pigeonholed into whatever her dad tells her she will be. And unlike Cersei, Ned actually seems to take pleasure in his daughter’s defiance.

But what about that last scene? Not only do we get a lot of Catelyn’s backstory, but it’s just pulled off with such aplomb I was thrilled by it. I really adore Tyrion (he shone throughout the episode) but Dinklage is superb in this scene, the way he looks to the side and is genuinely shocked and pleasantly surprised to see her sitting there, and then listens to her calling out to each of the clans without ever catching on to what she’s doing, and when he finally realizes what’s happening, his face is priceless. I’ve thought he was brilliant up to now, but in this scene he really rises up and brings it to a whole new level of really subtle facial acting. You seem to know a lot more about Catelyn than we know in the series so far; is her backstory something that comes later in the books or at this point in the action do you already know a lot about her?

Chris: Can I just say I cannot wait to see how they do the bit with Arya chasing cats? It’s wonderfully described in the book; the actress playing Arya has been so perfect, this can only bring the awesome.

The scene between Ned and Arya goes back to our comments above about the strength of GRRM’s female characters. Arya’s matter-of-fact rejection of the life Ned predicts for her is both a beautiful counterpoint to Joffrey’s arrogant acceptance of his mother’s dreams of power, and—taken in the abstract—a poignant, brief commentary on the constraints on women’s roles. Ned may indulge her tomboyish tendencies, but that doesn’t change the fact that a nobly born woman makes very few choices in her life. Of course, and this shouldn’t come as a galloping great shock to anyone who’s been paying attention, the fates have something entirely different in store for Arya than the life Ned outlines; and paralleling Arya’s resistance to those expectations is the slow realization on Sansa’s part that the life she dreams of is not golden and beautiful. The brutal death of Ser Hugh in the tourney right in front of her rips through the pomp and pageantry of mock battle to suggest the terror of true battle, and to show that not all knights are chivalrous ... all of which unfolds within the slowly dawning realization that princes can be sociopaths.

I think this last realization found expression with Septa Mordane in the Throne Room, when she interrupts her to ask of this was where the Mad King killed her grandfather and uncle. Several times in the books she is told, but several characters, that “life is not a song.” Here we see her starting to grasp that.

And yes—that final scene was superb, and another sequence that perfectly mirrors the book. Both Michelle Fairley and Dinklage were spot-on, and Dinklage’s expression as the swords are drawn on him is priceless. At this point in the book, you do know a fair bit about Catelyn—she’s pretty fully fleshed out. There is more to learn about her as the books progress, and more details and nuances emerge, but we have the broad strokes by this point. You learn a lot more in the book about her background as the eldest daughter of the Tully family, whose seat of power (which she mentions in passing in the scene) is the fortress of Riverrun—a nice little Joycean shout-out.

Game of Thrones Episode 1.03—“Lord Snow”

2011-05-04T19:35:00.012-02:30

Hello again all, and welcome to installment three of our Game of Thrones co-blogging adventure. As ever, my friend Nikki Stafford from Nik at Nite is providing the GRRM n00b perspective, and I will be providing the impressions of the GRRM nerd.

All set? Well then, here's Nikki ...

Episode 3, “Lord Snow,” is where we get a lot more backstory on the characters than before. This episode, while still boasting a lot of action, is more dialogue- and character-driven, with slow-paced scenes that you must watch as closely as any episode of The Wire, and even then you probably have to go back and watch it a second time just to get the nuances. Chris is going to cover many of the smaller details of those scenes below, so I’ll just say that this was the first week where, as a viewer, I found myself a bit lost (and desperate for a list of names of people!) Thankfully, Chris will provide that below, too (thank you, Chris!) That said, I still loved the episode very much.

Highlights:

• The beautiful construction of the throne room at King’s Landing, with that incredible throne of swords. I don’t know how it’s described in the book, but in the show it’s magnificent.
• Carcetti!! Chris and I have chatted endlessly to each other about The Wire for years, so I was excited about him getting to this episode and finally seeing him. I’d have to check this, but I believe he’s actually Irish, so the accent he’s putting on for this show is as convincing as the American one he did on The Wire. Brilliant. I love when HBO finds a talented actor and uses him/her again.
• Arya looks remarkably like Catelyn… I don’t know how they found these two actresses, but what a beautiful match.

Character Development:

• Oh Joffrey, you sniveling little whiner. How much did I love the depiction of him this week as a foot-stomping toddler, with his “Oh, do I have to marry that yucky cootie girl?” while he sucked on his thumb. The scene between him and Cersei is at once a perfect portrait of a mama’s boy, but there’s a sinister undertone throughout of just how dangerous he will be, especially with her fierce encouragement. “Everyone who isn’t us is an enemy.”
• Sansa. When I first watched this episode, I cringed at how ungrateful she is, thinking man, she and Joffrey are perfect for each other. But I think she’s a more complicated character than perhaps they’re making her seem in the show. Remember, last week’s show ended with the death of her direwolf, and if those dogs become intrinsically linked with their owners, there’s something missing in her now (I don’t know how deep the link runs, but I’m assuming there’s more in the books about them?) She’s been taken ahead with Ned rather than staying back with her mother, and it’s clear Ned is more at ease dealing with men than women. He gives her a doll because she’s a girl… and girls play with dolls, right? Not when they’re teenagers looking for a husband, they don’t. She reacts harshly, and he looks out of his element and unable to deal with the situation.
• Arya. She, too, shows that side of Ned in his dealings with her. Arya is the tomboy who’s interested in swords, and you can feel the relief that washes over Ned when he talks to her because this, this is the kind of girl he can deal with. Ned: “You know the first thing about swordfighting?” Arya: “Stick ’em with the pointy end.” He gives her exactly what she wants, signing her up for her “dancing” lessons (I adore these scenes) and watches her proudly from the wings. However, that final scene in the episode grows dark when we hear the clash of steel on steel in his mind as he watches his daughter pretend killed… what was he thinking there? Is he remembering the great battles? The death of his sister? The death of Targayren? The death of the woman who gave birth to Jon Snow? I’m intrigued, and perhaps the readers know these answers, but I like the subtlety of the scene.
• If winter itself could be a character, then we get a sense in this episode of just how long and awful the winters can be, both from the old lady telling her ghoulish tales to Tyrion talking about how many winters he’s seen in his lifetime. God, I think Canadian winters last an eternity, but three years? Talk about Seasonal Affective Disorder.
• Daenerys is pregnant, and she’s becoming more confident and powerful. The scene where she leaves her horse only to be followed by the horrible Viserys is brilliant. He’s as vile as Joffrey, and watching him being choked by the whip is nothing short of AWESOME. It’s trumped only by the guy who choked him (someone whom Viserys sees as a slave) saying, “You? Walk.”
• One final question for Chris (that I meant to ask last week): That guy who’s always talking to Daenerys (I can never pick up on his name), is he the same in the book? Does he give the Dothraki backstory throughout, or are they using him as a convenient Johnny the Explainer character in this show?

And now… here’s Chris to clear up many questions:

And here we are at King’s Landing—as the caravan enters its gates, I keep hearing the Star Wars line—“You’ll never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy”—running through my head. Ned has no time to rest before being thrown into the snake pit, having a confrontation with Jaime Lannister in the throne room in which we get some background—how Ned’s father and brother were killed by the previous king Aerys Targayren … and how Jaime was the one who killed him, despite being sworn to protect him.

This particular confrontation does not happen in the novel, but this episode departs more from the book than the previous two have. Departs in detail, but not in spirit: many of the set-pieces making up the episode—Jaime and Ned, Robert and Barristan the Bold exchanging war stories, Cersei tending Joffrey’s wolf bite—are invented, but for the purpose of clarifying themes and conflicts and character traits that the novel develops more gradually. On first viewing, it was a bit off-putting; on second viewing, I appreciated the artistry of it. The characters are deepening and the stakes are getting higher.

The title of the episode is a little misleading, considering that we don’t see a huge amount of Jon Snow. Also, we don’t see Daenerys until thirty-five minutes in. Most of the action unfolds in King’s Landing, with a fairly heavy emphasis placed in history and background—in particular, Jaime Lannister’s act of treason in killing the previous king is revealed as something more ambivalent than most of the characters would seem to want to think. Both Robert and Ned obviously hold Jaime in contempt for such a flagrantly dishonorable act, and both express their fundamental distrust of him because of it. However, we get hints of their hypocrisy: Robert has his throne in part because of Jaime’s supposed dishonor, and Ned rebukes him both for not acting to save his father and brother when the Mad King tortured and killed them, and subsequently killing Aerys Targaryen. You can’t have it both ways, Ned—but then, that is the contradiction of Eddard Stark’s painfully rigid sense of honor.

All in all, yet another excellent episode. Some more thoughts:

New Characters

This episode added a bunch of new faces to the ensemble. As a frequent complaint of those unfamiliar with the books has been the difficulty of keeping names straight, here’s the episode three primer:

• Varys the eunuch—The Spider, the master of whispers. Basically, the clearing-house for intelligence gathering at court. Varys knows everything that is going on, usually before it happens. Case in point, Catelyn’s “secret” arrival in King’s Landing.
• Renly Baratheon—The king’s youngest brother; handsome, louche, and a bit of a gadabout.
• Grand Maester Pycelle—Shrewd and canny, and ostensibly a font of wisdom.
• Petyr “Littlefinger” Baelish—Master of Coin, nicknamed Littlefinger because his family holdings are on the smallest of a cluster of peninsulas called The Fingers. He was once in love with Catelyn when they were youths, and dueled Brandon Stark, Ned’s older brother, when she was betrothed to him. Littlefinger lost, but Brandon Stark spared his life at Catelyn’s request. Baelish plays his own game, and is one of the slyest players in King’s Landing.
• Allister Thorne—Master at Arms at Castle Black. A thoroughly unpleasant character.
• Lord Commander Mormont—Father of Jorah Mormont, Lord Commander of the Night’s Watch.
• The boys at the Wall—We meet Grenn and Pyp, who ultimately become Jon Snow’s friends and allies.
• Barristan the Bold—Legendary knight, who even in his advanced age is renowned for his fighting skills.
• Lancel Lannister—Cousin of Cersei and Jaime, one of the many Lannisters inserted into service at King’s Landing.
• Yoren—A Night’s Watch recruiter.
• Maester Aemmon—The maester for Castle Black; ancient, wise, blind.
• Syrio Forel—Arya’s “dancing master,” a master swordsman from the Free City of Braavos.

Best Lines

• “War was easier than daughters.”
• “I hate your stories!” “I know a story about a boy who hated stories.”
• “Well, Lord Snow … It seems you’re the least useless person here.”
• “You’re a funny man! A very funny man!” … though obviously this one loses something on the page. Spoken however by Sean Bean as he chokes Littlefinger, he gives us a brief but striking insight into why Ned Stark is dangerous.
• “Ah, Starks … quick tempers, slow minds.”
• “They never tell you how they all shit themselves. They never put that part in the songs.”
• “I’m the First Ranger. The job is out there.” Am I the only person to hear an echo of Omar in The Wire here? “The game is out there.”
• “Here, a man gets what he earns. When he earns it.”
• “Boy, girl. You are a sword. That is all.”

What They Added / Changed

• “I haven’t played with dolls since I was eight.” Such a heartbreaking moment. Sansa still blames Ned and Arya for the death of Lady, and Ned’s clumsy attempt to make amends only worsens things. That he then shows his connection with Arya draws a line between him and his elder daughter. War, apparently, is only easier than daughters when the daughter in question isn’t interested in the arts of war.
• “You are my darling boy, and the world will be exactly as you want it to be.” Cersei here shows her doting love for her repulsive son, which stretches into irrationality, but then without missing a beat delivers a shrewd little lecture on governance and realpolitik. This is the best Cersei moment so far: demonstrating her cunning and cleverness, but also her blind spot where Joffrey is concerned.
• “Everyone who isn’t us is an enemy.” This should be the Lannister motto.
• “The boy won’t talk. And if he does, I’ll kill him. Him, Ned Stark, the King, the whole bloody lot of them, until you and I are the only people left alive in this world.” In the books, we only start to see the nature of the interaction between Jaime and Cersei in book three, when Jaime starts to get his own POV chapters. But they nail it here—Jaime’s ruthlessness emerges in this chilling declaration, articulating his single-minded devotion to his twin. Incidentally, the bit about the singers making a ballad about “The War for Cersei’s Cunt” is a GRRM line that comes in book three (I think … it might be book four).
• Robert and Barristan the Bold exchanging war stories. I did not at first care for this scene, and then on second viewing turned completely around on it. I love that the impression you get at first is that they’re talking about losing their virginity … because, in a way, they are. As mentioned above, we get a better sense of history and background, especially when Robert calls Jaime in to taunt him. It is also a lovely way to introduce Barristan Selmy, who develops into such a great character as the books progress. And Lancel! Who looks, if possible, even more prissy and whiny than Joffrey.
• The top of the Wall. In the books, the Wall is described as simply being a flat expanse “about as wide as the Kingsroad.” Here, they’ve turned it into a warren of trenches, much like the battlements on the top of castle walls.
• Yoren. Odd, this—in the books, Yoren is described as sallow, laconic, and dour. They’ve obviously decided to go a different route here in making him a hale and hearty kind of fellow.
• The exchange between Benjen and Tyrion. Between this conversation and Ned’s interactions with Littlefinger, we begin to see where Starks have a reputation for being prickly. At the same time, Benjen’s speech about what lies north of the wall is (forgive me) chilling. One of the things this episode does is set us up for what is to come: the emphasis on the dangers of the coming winter gets almost a little heavy-handed.
• Ser Jorah talking swords with the Dothraki. I loved this little exchange, a great summary of the difference in how Westeros and the Dothraki approach war and battle. Curved blade versus straight, speed versus power. And then at the end, that suspicious departure as Jorah learns that Daenerys is preggers … hmm ….

What They Got Exactly Right

• The Small Council. The dynamic of the council was pitch-perfect, and Robert’s profligacy with the royal treasury yet another revelation about his efficacy as king. Three million owed to the Lannisters? That’s not good.
• Ned and Arya. The scene between them was poignant, more so as it comes just after his epic fail with Sansa. Arya, we see, is Ned’s daughter to the bone, and he is much more at ease talking to her and being a comfort. That he not only lets her keep Needle, but then gives her lessons in swordsmanship shows just how simpatico they are.
• Littlefinger! I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again—I freakin’ LOVE Aidan Gillen. He was brilliant on Queer as Folk (the original British version), and even more so as the altruistic councilman turned politically savvy mayor Tommie Carcetti on The Wire. Littlefinger is a perfect role for him, and he plays it beautifully. We see, all at once, his need to impress and his shrewdness. A brothel is certainly a good place to hide Catelyn, but he so obviously wants to impress her with his success and/or make her jealous by being surrounded by beautiful half-naked women. Alas for Petyr, she is neither.
• Old Nan and her stories. Gods, that one gave ME chills. The woman they have playing Nan has her voice and tone down perfectly.
• Ned’s instinctive moment of violence with Littlefinger outside the brothel. As mentioned above, Sean Bean gets this perfectly. You understand why he has so frequently been cast as bad guys—he can be utterly terrifying, and there’s something about his intonation (combined with that accent) that makes you realize just how dangerous Ned Stark can be.
• Jon Snow practicing in the yard.
• Viserys freaking out on Daenerys. YES! The moment the whip curls around his neck and he lies gasping for air, I won’t lie, is deeply, deeply satisfying. And then when Jorah deliberately ignores his order to kill the Dothraki. Humiliations galore.
• Syrio Forel. In the book he is bald as an egg, but otherwise everything about him is spot-on—his accent, his words, his movement, his expressions. His grin when Arya describes the sword as a needle is worth the price of admission.

Answers for Nikki

• The Iron Throne: yep, they’ve done a very good job recreating the throne as it’s described in the books. The story behind it is that Aegon “The Conquerer” Targaryen, the first Targaryen king who united the Seven Kingdoms, had it made out of the swords of his defeated enemies.
• The direwolves do indeed have something of a connection to their humans—especially Bran, but that only really gets explicated in later books.
• The guy who’s always talking to Daenerys is Ser Jorah Mormont, an exiled knight. He went into exile because he broke the law in selling some poachers to a slaver, and it was Ned Stark he was fleeing from. And yes, he’s more or less the same in the book. He offers more in the way of exposition on the show than in the novels, but not too much. He is, incidentally, the son of the Night’s Watch commander.
• Littlefinger and Catelyn: in the books, Petyr Baelish was fostered with Catelyn’s family. The romantic attachment goes one way: Littlefinger was/is in love with Catelyn, but as she said in this episode, she has only ever thought of him as a little brother.

Game of Thrones 1.02 -- "The Kingsroad"

2011-04-27T18:30:00.001-02:30

Well sports fans, here we are again for episode two. What did everyone think? I’m still quite struck at just how well GRRM’s world has been translated to the small screen. At some stage we need to have a discussion about how television has become more cinematic than film, and how when it is willing to take on complex narratives, its storytelling capabilities leave movies in the dust.

Don't forget, these posts are cross-posted on this blog and Nikki's, so go give hers a look.

But for now, I again give the stage to Nikki for the un-booked reaction to the most recent Game of Thrones.

“There’s a war coming, Ned. I don’t know when, and I don’t know who we’ll be fighting, but it’s coming.”

This is the episode where the seemingly perfect marriage between Catelyn and Ned shows its deep cracks. As Catelyn sits by Bran’s sickbed, she’s in mourning not only for the son who is gravely ill, but for a marriage that is in danger as well. Ned is leaving her, much the same way he did when he went away and came back with Jon. This is also the episode where Catelyn begins to piece things together and believes the Lannisters had something to do with Bran’s fall out of the window. Considering her mama bear personality (and her wicked fighting skills), I’m thinking this is about to get really interesting.

Listening to Queen Cersei and her brother saying it would be merciful for Bran to die rather than live a cripple is disgusting. I loved the look on Jaime’s face when Tyrion said, “I hope the boy does wake; I’d be quite interested in what he has to say.” I’m thinking at this point this could go one of several ways: Bran dies (that wouldn’t be much fun… and by the end of the ep we know that’s not the case); Bran awakes and tells them everything (also not much fun); Bran wakes and tells only a couple of key people who then know the secret and could use it against the Queen; Bran wakes and has some sort of amnesia.

Cersei gains a wee bit of sympathy from us for telling us about the child that she lost. There’s a sadness to her that seems to permeate her constantly… even when she was “involved” with her brother at the end of the previous episode, there was a melancholy to even that act. But with the whole “butcher’s boy” incident, she loses that sympathy again. She’s cold-hearted, probably knows her wuss of a son is telling a lie, but she figures killing a direwolf (and the butcher’s boy) will bring the Starks down a peg. But clearly the act of killing the animal has the opposite effect. It would seem that not only are the direwolves connected to their immediate owner, but to each other, and all of the owners. The death of Lady sparks the reawakening of Bran, and now the REAL fun begins.

Highlights:

Tyrion slapping Joffrey over and over again. This is where we started to love him. The Hound says, “The prince will remember that,” and Tyrion replies, “I hope SO. If he forgets, be a good dog and remind him.”
Arya receiving her sword from Jon. “It’s so skinny.” “So are you.”
The direwolf taking on the intruder in a most grisly fashion, before setting itself up as Bran’s lookout.
Watching Daenerys take over and find a connection with Khal.
Joffrey becoming a simpering little wanker at the tip of Arya’s sword. Ugh, I hate him.

Did You Notice:

The sets of the courtyard are incredible, from the blacksmith area to the stables.
Arya’s direwolf is called Nymeria, after a warrior queen.
Arya seems closer to Jon, Ned’s bastard son, than her full brothers and sisters. Jon seems to understand her better than the others. In fact, when we see the next scene when Jon goes to say goodbye to Bran (amidst the seething loathing from Catelyn), Jon seems to care deeply for both his young half-siblings.
I wonder what the story is about Ned and Jon’s mother. There’s obviously a story there. Ned’s face changes completely when the king asks about her. The king acts like he won’t talk about her because he feels badly about what happened, but it seems more like he won’t talk about her because he still cares about her.
The spread Ned and the king have in the field is awesome and hilarious. Imagine… there must have been an entire coach just devoted to carrying the food.
Whoa, Catelyn’s got some fight in her!
The wall… is… TERRIFYING.
I was a little confused about the journey Ned and the king were on. I thought they were heading south (Ned appeared to be saying goodbye to Catelyn in a rather final way) and I couldn’t figure out how they were both suddenly back at Winterfell. But now I’m thinking they were just taking Jon to the point where he’d head off to the Wall.

Questions:

Those direwolves grow FAST. I’m assuming more time has passed than it seems. I’m curious to know, from the readers, if the book jumps, too, or do we see the immediate reactions from Ned and Catelyn when they find Bran’s body?
How old is Daenerys supposed to be?

And now, back to Chris.

In the comments for my last post, Nikki asked me if, as I watch Game of Thrones, I ever wish I hadn’t read the books—so that I might experience the series without knowing what was coming. When I replied, I said I was more intrigued to see how people who haven’t read the books would respond to the twists and turns of GRRM’s story. But while I was watching “The Kingsroad,” I found myself trying to imagine how I would enjoy the series if I was ignorant of the story.

It is a difficult task, doubly so because I am currently re-reading A Game of Thrones for the purpose of these posts, so everything is quite fresh in my mind when I sit down to watch new episodes. I have to imagine it denudes the viewing experience somewhat, as there is no suspense for me, and I get impatient to see my favourite parts, some of which are several episodes away. And it sometimes felt, with episode two, as if it unfolded as a series of set-pieces rather than an organically evolving story.

That being said, I don’t wish to give the impression that I didn’t love episode two, or thought it wasn’t good—I thought it was excellent. Yet again, we are given a fantastic sense of this other world, from the lush riverlands to the Dothraki Sea, to the stark (ha!) life on the Wall. And the characters are deepening beautifully. I’m particularly happy that we’re leaving Daenerys-as-victim behind already. In a genre notable for its lack of strong women, GRRM gives us an embarrassment of riches, and Dany arguably rises to the top of that group. Based on previews for next week, it looks as though she faces down Viserys, a character who rivals Joffrey as, to use Nikki’s phrase, the simperingest little wanker.
OK—so, my itemized thoughts:

What they left out

Bran’s dream. For the un-booked, Bran’s waking is preceded by a complex dream in which he flies high above Westeros, seeing everything going on in the world unfolding beneath him—very reminiscent of Frodo’s god-view from Amon Hen—while a three-eyed crow enjoins him to fly. I kind of figured they would leave this out, but still hoped they’d use it, if for no other reason than to clarify the geography of Westeros.

What they added

Cersei’s sad story of her dead child. As everyone will by now have surmised, her platinum blond brood of children are not Robert’s but Jaime’s. In her story, she describes the child as having had black hair, indicating that it was Robert’s trueborn. In the novel, she speaks of having been gotten pregnant by Robert, but that she terminated that pregnancy in disgust. Here it seems to suggest that, once upon a time, she was genuinely in love with the king. Not sure if I like this.
Jaime’s taunting of Jon Snow. Just to remind us how hateful Jaime can be, and providing a great contrast for Tyrion’s honest pragmatism later in the episode. Nikolaj Coster-Waldau doesn’t overdo it—just a slight edge, enough to cut, but also subtle enough that at first you can believe he’s being earnest.
Catelyn’s weird-ass dreamcatcher. What the hell is that thing she was making at Bran’s bedside?
Catelyn searching the broken tower and finding Cersei’s blonde hair.
Doreah tutoring Daenerys in the erotic arts. This is only hinted at in the novel, and comes somewhat later. In the novel, Dany’s reversal of power in the bedchamber results in pregnancy—it will be interesting to see if they go that route next episode, or wait. I must say, I was impressed with how they handled this scene, as there must have been a temptation to go more over-the-top with it (as they would certainly have done on Starz). But there was no point at which Dany was anything but the curious ingénue, and Doreah the worldly mentor. No indulgent faux-lesbian romp here.

What they got exactly right

Jon Snow giving Arya Needle.
Ned and Robert. Though in the novel this conversation happens on horseback, the tone and feel of it is totally faithful. We really get a strong sense of this long friendship, and the deep love these two men have for each other—but also of their fundamental difference in character.
Bran’s would-be assassin. That scene was the highlight of the episode for me, and came just at the moment I was thinking “the pace of this episode is notably slower.” For the un-booked, it unfolded pretty much exactly as it did in the novel, right down to Catelyn grabbing the blade of the knife.
Arya and Joffrey by the river. OMFG.
Tyrion and Jon. I had forgotten the unlikely friendship these two forge in the novel. The conversation they have around the fire is pitch-perfect. “My brother has his sword. I have my mind. And a mind needs books like a sword needs a whetstone.” A sentiment to please readers, and pretty much verbatim from the novel. I love that the writers are actually using GRRM’s dialogue when they can.
Speaking of GRRM’s dialogue, Daenerys’ conversation with her handmaidens about dragons is pretty much exactly lifted from the novel.
Ned and Arya facing down Robert and Cersei. Such a great scene, and such a fabulous insight into Robert’s character—we see here why he’s such a bad king. Loves a fight, hates a confrontation. And FINALLY we see Cersei show us some of her malicious steel. ‘Bout bloody time.

Slightly disappointing

The Hound. Really? That’s the best you could do with his face? He’s not nearly as terrifying as he is in the novels.
Ser Illyn Payne. Ditto.

What I’m loving

Sean Bean. The Darcy Effect is taking hold: as I reread A Game of Thrones, I’m hearing his voice in my head as I read Ned’s dialogue.
Peter Dinklage. He continues to nail this role.
Direwolves. I freely admit, I teared up at the end when Ned killed Lady. And when Arya threw rocks at Nymeria to get her to run away. What breed are those dogs? I want one.
Mark Addy. As I have previously mentioned, he was the actor I was most concerned about, and he is proving all those fears wrong. His take on Robert is nuanced and subtle, no small accomplishment with a character who is literally and figuratively larger than life.
Iain Glen. Ser Jorah Mormont is described differently in the novel—bigger, bluffer, less attractive—but Glen brings to the role a sad grit. I am biased in this actor’s favour, I should admit, given that he played Hamlet in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead.

Answers for Nikki

Time passing: when Catelyn musters everyone in the Godswood, she alludes to Bran having been asleep a month. And in the novel, the preternatural speed with which the direwolves mature is frequently remarked upon.
They’re not back at Winterfell, but are miles to the south. They take up residence in a local noble’s castle when Arya runs off. For those who have looked up the map online, they’re in the vicinity of the forks of the Trident.
In the novel, Daenerys is thirteen when she marries Drogo. They’ve aged all the young characters somewhat for the series. I don’t think they ever specify Dany’s age, but I would estimate it to be somewhere around sixteen.

Game of Thrones 1.01 -- "Winter is Coming"

2011-04-20T19:38:00.007-02:30

Hello all, and welcome to Poste the Firste of Chris and Nikki's co-blogging Game of Thrones project. For those clicking over here from Nikki's site, welcome! And for my few readers, if you haven't already, you should go and check out Nikki's blog ... if for no other reason than that she doesn't leave you waiting two months at a time for content, like some people. Oh, and she's awesome. That's another good reason.

But I shall cede the floor here to Nikki and let her introduce herself (she's the one holding the direwolf on the right) ...

Before I launch into my take on Game of Thrones, I should introduce myself! My name is Nikki Stafford, and I write about television over at my blog, Nik at Nite. I’ve known Chris for about 15 years now, ever since we took our MA together at U of T and alienated everyone else in our classes by talking about pop culture like it wasn’t something to be ashamed of. (Well... we weren’t entirely alone... one of our classmates went off and created a little website called Television Without Pity.) I’m the author of several analytical companion guides to TV shows, including Lost, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel, and others. I’m currently hosting a yearlong Buffy Rewatch on my site, and Chris is one of my guest commentators. I approached Chris a couple of weeks ago and asked if he would provide the informed commentary as the guy who’s read the books, while I just talked about the show itself. I was thrilled when he agreed. So here goes!

It opens with three men on horses, traveling through what appears to be a tunnel made of ice, bolstered by wooden beams. They come out of the other side of what we now realize is a gigantic wall made of ice and snow. They enter a wintry, barren forest that appears to have no life in it whatsoever. You hear nothing but the horse’s hooves and snorts. Except an occasional howl of... something. Giant flakes of snow fall gently, swirling around before they hit the ground. One of the men, who looks like he’s not playing with a full deck, sees a line of smoke, and drops the ground and crawls toward it. When he ventures up over the fallen log, what he finds is horrifying... heads on spikes, torsos, legs ripped off, pieces of human flesh, all laid on the ground forming a strange circle with a line through it. Horrified, he jumps up and turns, only to see a young dead girl nailed to a tree. He runs to the others, and we hear the first lines of dialogue. They argue about what the significance is. One of them is cocky, believing this is nothing to be afraid of, another wants to go back to the wall, and the one who saw it is frantic, siding with the guy who wants to leave. The cocky guy tells the goofy one that if he leaves, he’ll be caught and beheaded, and to get back on his damn horse and keep riding with him. They return to the place where the bodies were... and they are gone. There’s not even a trace of blood on the snow. The three men split up, two of them fearful, the third one striding into the camp as if there’s nothing to be scared of. When one finds entrails in the snow, some large spectre rises up from the trees and slices the cocky guy’s throat. The goofy guy, separated from the others, sees the very girl who’d been pinned to the tree standing in a clearing. She turns her head slowly, her giant dead eyes on him. With the sound of metal on metal, we see the tall, horrifying men racing through the trees, chasing the two fearful men. The goofy guy stops and turns in time to see his companion standing alone as one of the giant men comes up behind him, grabs him by the hair, and beheads him, tossing the head into the snow. The goofy guy falls to his knees, knowing he’s probably next. The screen goes black and the credits roll.

Welcome to the world of Game of Thrones.

Now, where the first five minutes of HBO’s new series might feel like a horror film, the rest of the episode (while still loving its blood spurts and gore) is an epic Tolkien-like piece, closest to Rome in the canon of previous HBO programs. This sprawling epic spans seven realms, all on an isle not unlike the United Kingdom, but feeling more like Middle Earth, with its treacherous areas and beautiful gentle ones. In the north we have Winterfell, watched over by Ned Stark and his wife, Catelyn (played beautifully by Michelle Fairley, who looks remarkably like Joan Allen... so much so that I was convinced it was her for the first two episodes). The landscape is green, but grey and cold. King Robert Baratheon, who rules over the Seven Kingdoms of Westeros, is in the South, where the sun is always shining through the windows and it looks warm and lovely. The realms themselves seem impossible to follow... or at least they WOULD, if it weren’t for the brilliant opening sequence.

Now, as someone who is completely new to the world of Westeros, I devoured the opening credits, watching it again and again before continuing on to the rest of the show. The camera pans over a map of the seven realms as each kingdom rises up, moving like little stop-motion animation pieces and you can see the various landscapes and proximity to one another. The music is sweeping and gorgeous, with mournful violins and big, driving, Gladiator-type music. Once again, HBO has hit a home run with yet another perfect credit sequence.

Speaking of HBO, as I’ve said many times before, the problem with HBO series is often the first episode. The Sopranos left me flat. Six Feet Under opens with a bang (literally) and then was dull for the rest of it. The Wire was complicated and difficult to enter and it took a couple of episodes to really grab onto it. Treme was joyous and musically glorious, but I couldn’t latch on to a single character in the beginning. The cursing of Deadwood was so off-putting I simply couldn’t stick around. Carnivale, one of my fave shows, was bleak and dark and had so much backstory in that first episode that it took a few weeks before I bothered moving to the second. Big Love remains one of the only HBO series that lured me in right from the beginning and never let go. (Actually, Oz would be another.) But, as with Carnivale, the problem with HBO is that it tries to do far, far too much in that first episode. Then the second one slows down considerably and allows us to ease in, and the third one usually grabs us and keeps us there until the end of the series.

Not so with Game of Thrones. My husband and I commented that from the opening sequence, we were hooked. There is SO much that could have happened here by way of exposition, but didn’t. They jump from one person to the next so fast that your head is spinning, and you can’t seem to understand who is who. But they don’t explain it, and just lay it all out there, creating enough sympathetic situations and people that you want to know more. You can’t wait for that second episode because they’ve left so many things unexplained you need to get that exposition that’s been denied. And that’s what makes this opening episode so amazing. So for the n00bs to George RR Martin’s world, I suggest watching that opening sequence a few times like I did, looking at the way each area in Westeros comes to life (funny, despite watching the men go through that wall of ice, it was only in the opening credits I realized just how vast and foreboding that wall is.

And so, the many characters: Arya is one of my favourites, the little Stark girl who sits in embroidery classes while watching her brother take archery lessons, wishing she could do the same. Not that she needs the lessons... she nails the bullseye when her younger brother Bran (who would probably rather be reading a book) fails. Brilliant character, and she only gets better in the episodes to come. Bran is the thoughtful, sensitive boy who would rather climb walls as if looking for something different in this world of mayhem and murder.

Ned Stark is played by ~~Boromir~~ Sean Bean, who is PERFECT in this role. Good-looking but with a weathered face that looks like it’s seen a lot, he exudes bravery, vulnerability, and care. He’s a ruler who sometimes has to be stern, but he has a great love for his family, people, and king.

He has a bunch of other kids, one of whom is a bastard son by another woman. Another boy is a ward whom Ned has raised as a son, even though his father was someone who’d tried to rise up against the king. Sansa Stark is the rather annoying older sister, who is inexplicably in love with Prince Joffrey, and the king hopes to join the Stark and Lannister families by marrying the two.

And then there are the Lannisters. The queen, Cersei, doesn’t do much in this first episode other than just walk around looking morose, but she’ll have her moment in a few weeks. Her twin brother, Jaime, looks and talks EXACTLY like Prince Charming from the Shrek movies (seriously, he stepped off a horse and tossed his hair at one point and I longed for them to show it in slow-mo). ;) And by the way... he’s sleeping with his twin on a regular basis. All together now: EW.

Prince Joffrey is the queen and king’s son, but not only is his hair golden like his mom’s and... her brother’s, he just seems sleazy and a little off. I’m not convinced this kid isn’t the product of inbreeding. (But please, no spoilers from anyone who knows one way or the other.)

And then... there’s the imp. Tyrion Lannister, the twins’ older brother, who is a dwarf and as such, has developed a nasty streak. Played by the always brilliant Peter Dinklage, he’s a sex-crazed, drunken and brilliant character who you simultaneously hate and adore throughout the series. A few episodes in, he’s my husband’s and my favourite character.

The king is a lifelong friend of Ned’s, and was once engaged to Ned’s sister, who died in some way I’m not quite sure of yet and who he’s been pining after ever since. His wife probably gets her kicks from her brother because the king’s never really given her a second glance.

The real conflict of the show happens when Ned’s mentor, John Arryn, dies and he receives word that he was actually murdered by the Lannisters, who are conspiring to kill the king. Ned is asked to come south to the king’s land, but Catelyn begs him not to go, knowing that the last time he disappeared for a long period of time to follow a king, he came back with a son by another woman.

And then there are the exiles, the platinum haired brother and sister (a duo who are almost as creepy as the queen and her brother), Viserys and Daenerys. Viserys, the simpering whiner, believes he is the rightful king, which he proclaims as he feels up his buxom sister. He forces her into a terrifying marriage against her will to Khal Drogo, the warrior leader of a tribe of horsemen called the Dothraki, whose wedding ceremonies usually consist of slaughter and rape. Awesometimes. But in case you’re watching this thinking it’s taken on misogynist undertones, just keep watching. Daenerys isn’t as limp and quiet as you might think. She is given a gift of petrified dragon eggs at her wedding, and these will be something she looks to for solace in episodes to come.

Throughout the series, you’ll see many people wearing a symbol (I’m sure the readers of the books can speak better to this than I can) of a sword through a circle, and it looks a lot like the image of the bodies splayed on the ground in the episode’s opening. I haven’t figured out the connection, but I’m sure it’s there.

The shocking and powerful cliffhanger of this episode occurs when Bran, climbing the castle walls, interruptuses the coitus between the queen and her brother, who stops and questions the boy, before thoughtlessly shoving him out of the high castle window. Gah!! Will Bran die? Or will he live and tell the queen’s dirty secret? Tune in next week. And now, back to Chris ...

OK, I'm back. I just want to begin by saying that it is an honour to be co-blogging with Nikki—especially on a topic near and dear to my heart. Two topics, really, two epic imaginative spaces that have preoccupied me for years now: George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire, and the dramatic programming on HBO. To have a forum in which to discuss the union of the two was too big an opportunity to pass up. Plus, I’m in awe of Nikki’s prolific, and prolifically intelligent blogging, so I’ll cheerfully hitch my wagon to her star.

As the half of this blogging duo who has read the books, I will be offering my thoughts on how successful the series has been in adapting Martin’s narrative, but I also hope to discuss some of the broader issues of fantasy as a genre, especially in terms of Martin’s vision, and how Game of Thrones does or doesn’t realize that vision (based on episode one, it totally does—but it’s early days yet). And I won’t be obsessing over every elision or change—even with ten hours of screen time to work with, there’s simply too much there in the novel. And besides which, there are inevitably nuances in prose fiction that films simply cannot replicate (and vice versa). Adaptation is always an exercise in translation.

This post, I should say now as a caveat, grew in the telling. I felt compelled to provide some context from which my commentary on the series will proceed; but if all you’re interested in is an avid GRRM fan’s take on the series, you might as well skip it. No worries.

By way of an introduction …

I have been an avid fantasy reader since reading The Lord of the Rings at the age of eleven. Unfortunately, perhaps as well as anyone, as an English professor I see the genre get a bad rap. So it goes with most genre fiction, though I’m pleased to say that amongst the enclaves of younger faculty there is more of a tolerance for it.

Though if we’re being honest with ourselves, we have to admit that the knock against fantasy as escapist, regressive, and nostalgic—and at times egregiously misogynist—isn’t always unfair. The lurid covers staring down at us from bookstore shelves speak to this ambivalence, and it can be difficult to take a novel seriously when its cover art depicts a cartoonishly busty warrior-woman in a leather bustier and boots standing in the middle of a snowy landscape. But authors like George R. R. Martin are living proof that to tar the entire genre thus is to miss the fact that fantasy is increasingly becoming a vehicle for decidedly humanist allegories of power and politics. Knee-jerk condescension or the thoughtless depiction of fantasy audiences as the stereotypical pimply basement-dwelling D&D player ignore the thoughtful, intelligence reinvention of the genre by Martin, Neil Gaiman, Philip Pullman, Guy Gavriel Kay, Terry Pratchett, Robin Hobb, Richard K. Morgan, Joe Abercrombie, and many others.

Perhaps it goes without saying that, on this point, A Song of Ice & Fire is Exhibit A. GRRM’s world is notably free of both Aslans and Saurons; it is a world sketched in shades of grey, with deeply nuanced characters possessing familiar ambitions, fears, and desires; where power is not something tangibly manifested in a ring or a sword or a suit of armour, but which is a shifting and fluid thing that all the key players blunder after with varying degrees of gamesmanship. In other words, if the word is not too contradictory in this context, it is a deeply realistic world.

And that is what makes it perfect for HBO. Having only watched the first episode, I hesitate to make confident predictions; but if the series keeps on with the faithfulness to GRRM’s vision it displayed last Sunday, then its byzantine narrative web will be intimately familiar to any devoted viewer of The Wire or Deadwood; its plots and conspiracies, to say nothing of its epic scale, will evoke echoes of Rome; and the centrality of family as both site and source of personal identity and strife will resonate with fans of The Sopranos and Six Feet Under. One question I have heard voiced is why HBO should seek to depart from the tried and true naturalistic power of the shows just mentioned (a question that elides the ongoing presence of True Blood, but never mind) in favour of embracing epic fantasy? The simplest answer to that it hasn’t—Westeros may be another world, but the closer you look, the more familiar it becomes.

At any rate ... on to the first episode.

There will inevitably be many points of departure between the books and the television series, but this first episode seems to promise that they will mostly be superficial. So during the opening sequence as Ser Waymar Royce, Will, and Gared ride through the tunnel at the base of the Wall, my instinctive inner protest that “Hey! That tunnel shouldn’t be straight through the ice, but crooked, with many inner gates along the way!” quickly gave way to me geeking out over the image of the Wall itself as the three rangers emerged. The entire prologue unfolds differently than in the novel: the dead wildlings aren’t ritually mutilated, Waymar Royce actually faces down the White Walker—vainly, of course, but it’s a brief moment of respect for an otherwise petulant lordling—and it is Gared, not Will, who escapes only to be executed.

But these are trivial points. The television prologue maintains the same spirit as the novel’s, with the same conflict of personalities at work. The visual realization of the Haunted Forest is … well, haunting, and the emergence of the White Walkers and the wights/ice-zombies their victims turn into is suitably terrifying. If I was going to quibble, it would be on two points: first, the “White Walker” we see is notably un-white—and far from the lithe, pale terrors GRRM describes, it seems more like a hulking and monstrous barbarian. And secondly, in the novels the name the White Walkers go by is the “Others.” But I suppose that might prove a little confusing in the post-Lost television landscape.

The point here being, I suppose, is that this is more or less what we can expect: certain liberties taken, but the spirit of the novels carefully hewed to.

For those who haven’t read the books, take the time to watch the credits carefully—if you’re anything like me, having a mental map of a fantasy world helps orient you, and in this lovely credits sequence they lay out the basic geography of Westeros and the proximal relationships of the different narrative threads. (If you want a more specific or exhaustive map, there are many online, such as here). But they are also a small masterpiece, as are many of HBO series’ credit sequences—something of a lost art on network television, where these days they are often elided entirely to make room for more ad time. Here we move across continents to the key places—Winterfell, King’s Landing, Castle Black, Pentos—zooming in from our gods’-eye view to see them rise, toy-like, as a series of gears and cogs that bespeak the conspiratorial gears that grind away throughout Martin’s intricate narrative.

And it is not long before we encounter plots and secrets. The fugitive Will is captured and executed by Ned Stark (Sean Bean) himself, vainly attempting to warn his captors of the white walkers. Back at the Stark stronghold of Winterfell comes dire news of the death of Jon Arryn, Hand of the King, and former mentor to Ned. And worse yet: the king is riding north with all his retinue to be the Starks’ royal house guest, certainly determined to make Ned his new Hand. But before this, we have a glimpse of where one major narrative thread will unfold: King’s Landing, the capital city of the Seven Kingdoms. Cersei Lannister, Queen of the Realm, and her twin brother Jaime let it be known that Jon Arryn knew something that could have put their heads on pikes.

One of the things that deeply impressed me about this first episode is the deft touch it had in telling the story. There was a refreshing lack of lengthy exposition (never something HBO series tend to go in for), and character traits that GRRM develops over chapters the director economically introduces in brief conversations, or a series of looks and gestures. A case in point, and probably the best example of what I mean: Arya escaping her embroidery to put an arrow in the bullseye of the target her brother Bran aims at. That moment clarifies the fraught place both have in their family in terms of who they are, what is expected of them, and what they desire for themselves. Bran here is brooding and thoughtful, at pains to please his father; Arya, escaping the shadow of her beautiful, feminine sister to show her talents for the masculine arts.

It is exactly this deft, economical touch that makes me wonder if Troy Patterson at Slate actually watched the advance DVDs he received before he wrote:

There are unscalable slabs of expositionistic dialogue clogging the forward movement of the story. Sonorous and/or schmaltzy talk substitutes for the revelation of character through action. There is the sense of intricacy having been confused with intrigue and of a story transferred all too faithfully from its source and thus not transformed to meet the demands of the screen.

Um, what? I suppose it’s possible that in future episodes the series shifts gears in favour of length, sententious history lectures about the Seven Kingdoms, but somehow I doubt it (those don’t even really occur in the novels, where they would not exactly be out of place). Similar to the atrocious NYT review by Ginia Bellafante, Patterson seems to be approaching this series with a pre-formed sense of what all fantasy must be like, assuming that if GRRM writes fantasy then it must ape Tolkien’s often absurdly elevated diction. The only “sonorous” speech I can recall from the episode are actually moments of ceremony—Ned Stark pronouncing Will’s sentence of death, and King Robert formally asking Ned to be Hand of the King. Other than that, the language is pretty straightforward and often profane. Really, there’s more sonorous and elevated diction in Deadwood (a lot, really).

But I digress. I would be remiss if I did not acknowledge what are, to my mind, the two single greatest contributing factors to this show’s success: first, the scenery; and second, the casting.

The sheer look of the show is breathtaking, as is the scale. The renderings of the Wall, Winterfell, and King’s Landing—both in terms of their look from a distance and their textures and details up close—have been superbly done. While, as I mentioned above, GRRM’s world notably lacks the epic characters of classic fantasy (or, indeed, classic epics), it is nevertheless epic in scope, and the visuals the series produces are more than up to the task.

In terms of casting, watching the roles get filled over the last year and a half has been the biggest point of excitement for myself as well as, I imagine, many other diehard fans of the books. There have been no missteps. The one actor who gave me trepidation, I will admit, was Mark Addy—he seemed too happy and often gormless in previous roles to play King Robert, but he carries it off beautifully. Sean Bean is of course perfect in the role of Ned (though I should admit to being biased on this front as a long-time Sharpe fan), and Michelle Fairley—not an actress with whom I was previously familiar—does an excellent job in capturing Catelyn’s complex character: her heartfelt yet guarded love for Ned, her abiding sense of being out of place in the north, her protectiveness of her children, and her antipathy to Ned’s bastard son Jon Snow. The look she shares with Jon, looking down into the courtyard, is another great example of how the series manages to communicate character without unnecessary exposition.

The performance that most blew me away was Peter Dinklage as Tyrion—which makes me happy, as Tyrion is one of my favourite characters, one that really demonstrates GRRM’s talent for subtlety and nuance. But that being said, Nikolaj Coster-Waldau matches him well as his brother Jaime. The scene when Jaime blithely walks in on Tyrion and the prostitute, and their banter, is quite true to the spirit of their relationship in the books. Jaime himself is very well-played, with Coster-Waldau displaying the easy arrogance and amused indifference of Jaime Lannister. The final scene when Bran accidentally sees him and Cersei in coitus was pitch-perfect: Jaime’s reaction is amusement, not fear, and when he looks back at his twin, his grin says “Can you believe this kid?” And then—“The things I do for love,” shoving Bran out, without a measurable change in his face. Not cruel, but also not caring that he probably just killed a child.

If there’s someone on whom the jury is still out, it is Lena Headey as Cersei Lannister. She looks the part, but plays Cersei with a sadness that I find somewhat out of step with the Cersei of the novels. I get no malice underneath her words and actions—she seems to be playing her as if she mourns the loveless state of her marriage, rather than someone with her own plots and ambitions. When Robert spurns her, and later openly flirts with a servant girl, it hurts rather than irks her. Perhaps that malice and ambition will emerge later … I hope so, otherwise she won’t be a particularly interesting character.

Across the narrow sea … our exiled Targaryens Viserys and Daenerys, Magister Illyrio, Ser Jorah Mormont, and of course Khal Drogo. Presumably they’re going to give Emilia Clarke as Daenerys more to do than stand and look forlornly at things. I wasn’t able to get a good read on her in this episode, mainly because she did not do or say much. She makes a lovely Dany, and the terror in her eyes the closer she comes to consummating her marriage to Drogo is heartbreaking … but I look forward to the Dany who evolves as she gains confidence. By contrast Harry Lloyd’s Viserys get that character’s arrogance, cruelty, and childish petulance exactly right. My favourite moment is when Khal Drogo, having been initially presented with his presumptive bride, rides off without saying a thing. “What’s wrong? Didn’t he like her?” Viserys protests, his voice going up into a whiny register.

I never quite imagined Khal Drogo being quite that beefcake, but aside from that, actor Jason Momoa (soon to be seen as Conan the Barbarian) certainly looks the part.

All in all, a very promising start to the series. I’m sort of chomping at the bit for Ned to get to King’s Landing, as the piece of casting I most anticipate is Aidan Gillen. Tommy Carcetti as Littlefinger? Too perfect.

Winter is here ... and the geeks couldn't be happier

2011-04-19T16:18:00.005-02:30

OK, to start with, I realize that my last blog post announced I would finally post the last few vampire cage matches in three days time. Did I say three days? I, um, meant three months.

Fine, fine ... my bad. In my defense, I have had one of the busiest and otherwise crappiest terms of my academic career, for reasons mostly not to do with school (though a full course load this term didn't help). To any students reading this post: it wasn't you. I had great classes. Just ... you know, a lot of them.

ANYWAY. I throw myself back into blogging now just as the dust settles and I get ready to shift into research/writing mode ... and the event kick-starting my newfound blogging resolve? Well, what do you think?

That's right, sports fans! On Sunday last, the event we've all been waiting for happened -- HBO premiered its first episode of Game of Thrones, the series based on George R. R. Martin's epic fantasy series. And it was AMAZING. So much so, and so enthusiastic was the response, that they've already announced Season Two.

And I'd love to tell you in detail what I thought about it, but that will have to wait until tomorrow. Why, you ask? Because my most excellent friend and far superior blogger Nikki Stafford, TV commentator and critic extraordinaire was blown away by the first few episodes (in her role as TV commentator and critic extraordinaire, she was given the first few episodes on DVD ahead of time to review ... yeah, yeah, I know, but we forgive her), but has not herself read the novels. So she has suggested that we co-blog the first season together -- her from the perspective of a GRRM newbie, me from the perspective of a guy who bought the first novel in hardcover. In 1996. (These books have been a long time in the writing).

So tomorrow, our respective responses to episode one will go live on both her blog and my own humble piece of the webz here. And since I can't very well leave Nikki out to dry here, there will be no promising of posts and then buggering off for two and a half months. Promise.

Our simul-posts will go up every Wednesday. Stay tuned!

The Great Buffy Rewatch and the imminent return of the vampire cage matches

2011-02-09T09:53:00.002-03:30

My friend Nikki has been doing "The Great Buffy Rewatch" over at her excellent blog dedicated to all things teevee, NIk at Night, and invited friends and colleagues of hers who write about television in some capacity to take part. And this week it was yours truly's turn ... so click on over to Nikki's blog to see my thoughts on episodes 2.04, 2.05, and 2.06 ("Inca Mummy Girl," "Reptile Boy," and "Halloween" respectively). Nikki posts twice, first with spoilers, and second with spoilers whited out for the newbies.

Anyway, as I mentioned before, I've been meaning to get back to the vampire cage matches that I have let languish for an unconscionably long time. Hopefully the somewhat more substantial readership Nikki boasts will help kickstart them. For thus I say unto you, lo, the cage matches shall recommence! In three days time! Come out, read my summary of the fight, and vote for which vamp you think should reign supreme! We are now at the semifinals, with two spectacular matches coming up: Blade vs. Eric Northman of True Blood, and the one the Whedon fans have been waiting for: Angel vs. Spike.

Three days:

Watching Dr. Strangelove (yet) again

2011-01-22T23:59:00.002-03:30

"I can no longer sit back and allow Communist infiltration,
Communist indoctrination, Communist subversion,
and the international Communist conspiracy
to sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids."
—Colonel Jack D. Ripper, Dr. Strangelove

I do so love this film—not only is it easily my favourite Kubrick film (a director whose genius I freely acknowledge while not necessarily loving much of his oeuvre), but it is a fixture in my top five favourite films, period. I've been rewatching it this afternoon and pulling screen captures in preparation for teaching it in my intro to film class this week, and just generally losing myself in it.

Whenever I watch it, my laughter at its hilarity is always slightly checked by an awareness of just how dark and bleak the humour is—or was. The first time I ever watched the film was for a class in my undergrad, in the early 90s. Hence, my familiarity with Dr. Strangelove began after the Cold War had ended, during a time when it appeared to many that the United States was permanently ascendant and American-style liberal democracy had proven itself the acme of societal evolution (see, Fukuyama, Francis: History, and the Ending Thereof). But even now, with those delusionally halcyon days of the new world order rather emphatically behind us, and amidst the hysterical rhetoric of the War on Terror, it is difficult to understand the nuclear paranoia of the Cold War in the 50s and 60s. It is hard to imagine the ever-present anxiety of the spectre of nuclear annihilation; my parents talk about air raid drills as a regular punctuation of their young lives, of being sent home from school early during the Cuban Missile Crisis praying with their families around the radio that they weren't about to be wiped out by thermonuclear bombs. I have at least a little inkling: I remember my father's sombre concern about Reagan's election in 1980 (I was eight at the time), expressed as "I'm afraid he won't be afraid of starting a war with the Russians." I came of age during the Cold War Redux, as we might call it, as Kissinger's détente gave way to Reagan's overheated rhetoric about "the evil empire," and films such as The Day After gave us starkly vivid images of the aftermath of a nuclear war. (I was not allowed by my parents to watch that movie—they did not want me or my brother to have to deal with the anxiety that inevitably came from such a brutal depiction of nuclear warfare—which was, not insignificantly, optimistic in its estimation of human survival).

Once (again, I think I was around eight years old), I quoted to my parents an interesting fact I'd read about the survival talents of spiders: that they would likely be one of the few species to survive nuclear war. To which my mother replied, "No, we'll survive!" I'm not sure what disturbed me more: the vehemence with which my cool factoid was quashed, or the tremor in my mother's voice as she did so. I think I can start charting my own nuclear anxieties from that moment. I remember too the sense of dread I experienced every time they moved the hands forward on the Doomsday Clock—seeing it as I did with the literal-mindedness of a child, believing that when it hit midnight, that was the end.

Even growing up with such anxieties, the nuclear paranoia that was the context for Dr. Strangelove remains hard to fully imagine today. And so it is similarly hard to wrap my head around the audacity of the film's humour. The novel on which it is based, Red Alert by Peter George, is a straightforward political thriller; and Stanley Kubrick's initial script drafts were not humourous or satirical, but essayed a serious and dramatic narrative. But he found that the tone of the story kept running up against the often absurd contradictions of nuclear logic, especially in the premises of mutually assured destruction. "I found that in trying to put meat on the bones and to imagine the scenes fully," Kubrick said, "one had to keep leaving out of it things which were either absurd or paradoxical, in order to keep it from being funny; and these things seemed to be close to the heart of the scenes in question." Hence his decision to make it a black comedy, which was one of those choices that should be enshrined in film history as a turning point into genius. For Dr. Strangelove could not have been the trenchant critique it was had it played it straight: the absurdly amoral discussions in the War Room, in particular General Buck Turgidson's suggestion that they go all in on Colonel Ripper's sneak attack, exactly echo the actual contingency plans of the Cold War.

My favourite line in this scene is Turgidson's caveat "I'm not saying we wouldn't get our hair mussed!", which sums up so perfectly the desperately euphemistic logic of nuclear war: millions of lives instantly snuffed out, millions more suffering the inexorable agonizing death of radiation poisoning, and billions ultimately dying of privation and exposure, neatly divorced from brutal reality with such terms as "acceptable losses." Possibly one of the best discussions of this subject I've read is Martin Amis' essay "Thinkability," which prefaces his 1985 collection of short stories Einstein's Monsters. The euphemisms and clichés of the Pentagon's rhetoric about nuclear war all attempt to hide the basic, inescapable reality of nuclear war, which Amis characterizes as "everything becoming nothing, all at once."

What is less difficult to comprehend and understand today is the culture of conspiracy and paranoia that informs Colonel Ripper's decision to launch his pre-emptive attack. Though framed in the language of absurdity, the figuration fluoridation of drinking water as a Communist plot was not an uncommon meme in conspiracist circles. Some things never change: watching Glenn Beck today (or rather, watching the thirty seconds or so of him I can stand at a time), Colonel Ripper's delusions seem mild. I take comfort in the fact that Beck does not command a wing of B-52 bombers, but it is a sad statement of today's climate when the satirical language of Colonel Jack D. Ripper is mild in comparison to that of the highest-rated news channel in the U.S.

But I digress … I told my students the other day that when we study film, in addition to its aesthetic dimension, we're concerned both with what they can tell us about their historical moment and with what they still have to tell us about ours … and that, ultimately, it's the latter category that tends to most define those films that we return to over and over. Dr. Strangelove never gets tired for me. Hopefully my class feels similarly.

Bad blogger me. Also, film class! And other stuff.

2011-01-21T16:52:00.002-03:30

Hello everyone ... I have been a very bad blogger these past several weeks, and now I am back to repeat the cycle of Energetic Blogging Productionà Tapering Offà Long Silenceà Series Of Lackadaisical Apologies For Long Silenceà Renewed Burst Of Blogging Energy. Hopefully this is the sole Lackadaisical apology, to be followed by a new burst of energy.

No promises, considering this term is rather crazy. I have three courses, all of which are full, and one of which I'm essentially building from the ground up. But I am happy to say they are all extremely enjoyable to teach, and my cohort of students this term is rather amazing—they're all seemingly interested and engaged, and what's more, they laugh at my jokes. Which is good, because I'm so busy with course prep that I don't really have to chance to work up new material.

I'm particularly enjoying my intro to film class, "What is Film?" I was set to teach one of our mandatory surveys, "Major British Authors since 1800," but the department head circulated an email asking if someone would be willing to teach the film class.

I don't think I've ever answered an email so quickly. I don't think thirty seconds elapsed between hearing the new message beep and me firing off my reply. YES, I will teach introduction to film, especially if it means I can trade an English survey course for it. Not that I don't enjoy teaching the great swathe of literature since Blake, but come on ... a film course? In which I basically get to choose whatever films I want? Too ... much ... awesomeness ...

Of course, I ran into trouble in narrowing my list down to a maximum of twelve films ... so after finally paring it down to forty-three of my favourite movies, I looked at what I had and broke them up into twelve loose categories. I then posted that as a note in Facebook, tagged a bunch of film enthusiast friends, and asked people to vote for one from each category. Whatever won in each would be on the course.

Sometimes net democracy is your friend—not only for the fact that it took the onus of that final, agonizing decision off of me, but also for the amazing discussion and argument that unfolded in the comments.

Anyway, the final screening list is sort of like a who's-who of my favourite films. We're doing, in the order we're covering them in class, Rear Window, Alien, Dr. Strangelove, Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, The Big Lebowski, Citizen Kane, Double Indemnity, Blade Runner, The Good the Bad and the Ugly, Moulin Rouge, 28 Days Later and Pontypool. Again: So. Much. Awesomeness. I am concerned that my lectures will devolve into little more than me geeking out a lot. So far we've done Rear Window and Alien ... and, yes, there have been some moments of total geeking out. But to be fair, that's happened among some of my students too (did I mention I have awesome students this term? And I'm not only saying so on the off-chance they read my blog).

I'm particularly concerned about what my lecture for Crouching Tiger will be like, considering that the sheer beauty of that film reduces me to a quivering pulp whenever I watch it. I expect I will show clips and stills and the content of my lecture will be along the lines of "I mean ... come on ... seriously ... isn't that just ... my God ... it's so ... fuck!" But serious. Please look me in the eye and tell me that film isn't gorgeously made and composed ...

OK. See? This is what I'm talking about! I even veer off into digressive geeking out during a blog post. Must. Keep. It. Together.

In other news, I had my second column in FlowTV.org go live this past weekend. Regular readers of my blog will recognize some of the theme and substance, as it's about zombie films and The Walking Dead—but please go peruse it and leave your comments. And I will soon be a guest blogger on my friend Jen/Nikki's site as she continues The Great Buffy Rewatch, revisiting all seven seasons of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Apropos of which, I plan to finally conclude the Vampire Cage Matches—seeing as how her blog gets about a million times the readers as mine, hopefully I can pull in the masses to vote for who, in the end, is the most kickass vamp.

And in the meantime, I'll try not to be such a slagabed when it comes to blogging. Scout's honour.*

*I was never a scout.

Beyond words

2011-01-14T16:22:00.002-03:30

Though I've apparently been on a bit of a vacation from this blog, I did idly consider writing various posts on pleasant topics over the Christmas holidays. Unfortunately, the impulse to not write was compounded by the general impulse to sit, eat, and drink by the fire. And since getting back to St. John's, class prep has kept me pretty insanely busy.

So it's unfortunate that I feel prompted to return to ye olde blog on a dark and disturbing subject. Since Representative Gabrielle Giffords and numerous others were shot this past Saturday by a deeply disturbed and mentally unbalanced young man in Arizona, the rhetoric and argument has saturated the blogosphere. Aside from the predictable back-and-forthing between rightwing and leftwing pundits, it has been heartening to see a significant amount of thoughtful, sober discussion.

That being said, I have attempted for the past three days or so to compose my own thoughts on the subject, and really failed entirely. And then, listening to President Obama's speech in Tucson, I just gave up—he said everything I would have wanted to say, and said it better. By several orders of magnitude. In the face of such a tragedy, he said, "We recognize our own mortality, and are reminded that in the fleeting time we have on this earth, what matters is not wealth, or status, or power, or fame - but rather, how well we have loved, and what small part we have played in bettering the lives of others."

Amen.

Hitch v. Beck

2010-12-10T14:04:00.001-03:30

Christopher Hitchens in Vanity Fair on the mendacity of Glenn Beck and his Tea Party acolytes:

Having an honest and open discussion ... is not just a high priority. It's more like a matter of social and political survival. But the Beck-Skousen faction want to make such a debate impossible. They need and want to sublimate the anxiety into hysteria and paranoia. The president is a Kenyan. The president is a secret Muslim. The president (why not?—after all, every little bit helps) is the unacknowledged love child of Malcolm X. And this is their response to the election of an extremely moderate half-African American candidate, who speaks better English than most and who has a model family. Revolted by this development, huge numbers of white people choose to demonstrate their independence and superiority by putting themselves eagerly at the disposal of a tear-stained semi-literate shock jock, and by repeating his list of lies and defamations. But, of course, there's nothing racial in their attitude …

This? This is what happens when the exceptionally intelligent critique the exceptionally stupid.

As anyone who reads this blog knows, it's six to five and pick 'em whether I will, on reading a Christopher Hitchens piece, (a) agree vigorously, (b) find myself rethinking a position I'd had previously, or (c) be enraged to the point of apoplexy. This happens to be an example of category (a), but you've probably figured that out. But even when he pisses me off (as he pretty much did 24/7 in the lead up to the Iraq War), I keep reading him, because such a sharp mind (that expresses itself in such enviable prose) deserves to be read.

I'm an atheist, but not so militantly as Hitchens that I don't find myself offering up a prayer each time I read about his ongoing fight with oesophageal cancer. If the disease claims him—as he candidly grants it probably will, statistically—we will have lost a voice that always elevated the level of political and social debate, unapologetically so, in a time when public discourse sometimes seems locked in a determined race to the lowest and most hysterical denominator.

The Walrus, thirty years later

2010-12-08T10:46:00.002-03:30

I had an ex-hippy Renaissance Lit professor in my undergrad that was prone to making statements like, "Elizabethan poets were the rock stars of their day, and had comparable influence on society—much like the way in which John Lennon single-handedly ended the Vietnam War."

I think it's safe to say that might be giving the man a wee bit too much credit, but it's hard to deny that Lennon had a profound influence on the world of which he was a part—enough so that one wonders what the next thirty years would have been like had he not been killed. What would Lennon have thought of the Reagan/Thatcher years? The meteoric snowballing of music technology? What kind of voice would he have been on the Bush/Blair imperial adventures? Would he have continued to be an influential, symbolic conscience of society? Would he have faded into post-pop star irrelevance?

Futile questions to ask, of course ... it is more interesting to see how he has functioned as an example for those musicians who have attempted to be our social conscience.

Following the lead of my friend Nikki over at Nik at Nite, I want to avoid posting "Imagine," as I'm sure we'll all hear that played or see it posted numerous times today. Instead, here's Lennon at his tripped-out best:

And here's my personal favourite Beatles' tune:

Oh, Danny boy ... the pipes, the pipes are calling ...

2010-12-03T13:14:00.004-03:30

My televisual guilty pleasure for the last while has been the reboot of Hawaii Five-O. It's fun, and funny, and pretty and shiny. It also stars Daniel Dae Kim, formerly of Lost and Angel, on whom I have a serious man-crush. And Grace Park, late of Battlestar Galactica, on whom I have a, well, regular crush . But the show also has a recurring fun moment for Newfoundlanders, whenever Steve McGarrett introduces himself and then says, "And his is my partner ... Danny Williams."

I'm not sure what the news coverage of Danny's resignation as premier is like in the rest of the country, but here in Newfoundland it's pretty much all anyone can talk about. Which I suppose is fair enough—in a province that breeds big personalities, Danny has been one of the biggest. And he has a stratospheric popularity that most politicians only attain in their fevered imaginations. In response to speculation that his resignation was prompted in part by his approval rating "plummeting" to sixty-seven percent, one caller on CBC radio this morning drily reminded us that Dalton McGuinty and Jean Charest are currently at sixteen and fourteen percent, respectively. Sixty-seven percent approval is what passes for public condemnation for Danny, who has spent the better part of his reign comfortably in the eighties.

That popularity does not however really reflect Danny Williams' deeply controversial nature: the flip side of his fearlessness, passion and determination to do right by Newfoundland is his reputation for being thin-skinned, autocratic, and vindictive. It is perhaps telling that the people who are most critical of him have tended to be those who have actually had to deal with him, and who have found themselves at the unpleasant end of his ire. But that, to hear testimonials on the news of late, is in fact a rather small minority.

I should probably offer the caveat here that I am not particularly well-versed in provincial politics, and hence cannot speak to the particulars and specifics of Danny's time in office. Anyone wanting a very incisive analysis of Newfoundland politics should check out Ed Hollett's blog, The Sir Robert Bond Papers. His post-mortem on Danny's resignation is particularly worth reading, as he offers a good breakdown of the appearances and realities of Danny's time in office.

I am myself more interested to see what happens next. When I read the Globe and Mail's article reporting on Danny's resignation, the most intriguing part was the comments section. A lot of Newfoundlanders posted, almost universally praising the departing premier. But the comments from people across the rest of the country were similarly glowing: one might have thought that the memory of Danny taking down Canadian flags at all government buildings five years ago would have stuck in people's craws still, but that event is either forgotten or has been eclipsed by the following years. Mainly, people praised him as a courageous politician with the cojones to stand up to Ottawa. Tellingly, some of the most frequently repeated comments were from people in B.C. or Ontario inviting Danny to come and run those provinces, favourably contrasting his efficacy against the incompetence of Gordon Campbell and Dalton McGuinty.

The second most common comment encouraged Danny to make the move into federal politics, usually framed in the sentiment that "we need more politicians like Danny in Ottawa!" I would dearly love to see him do this, but think it unlikely, for very similar reasons.

To be clear: it is not so much that I want Danny Williams as a player in Ottawa, as that I would be utterly fascinated to see how he fared. Really, it's a question of context: Danny could be as powerful and flamboyant as he has been, could in fact build his rather singular cult of personality, specifically because of where he is. One of the major reasons for his enormous popularity is that he essentially flipped the script for Newfoundland, and gave voice to the bone-deep pride its people have for their province, all the while being seen to stand up to the powers that be in Ottawa. He was fortunate in his adversary: his passionate advocacy for Newfoundland was best expressed in opposition to a cold, despotically indifferent Canada, and Stephen Harper obliged him by playing that role perfectly ... to the point where Danny had almost as broad a fan base outside Newfoundland as within.

The reason the prospect of Danny Williams entering federal politics fascinates me—and the reason why I think it's highly unlikely he will—is it would be interesting to see how he changed. On the larger stage, absent of his veritably Manichaean stance opposite Ottawa, he would lose much of the traction he had at home. Which is not to say he would not necessarily be a good politician—just that he would lose much of what made him "Danny" here in Newfoundland.

Of course, there is also the fact that he is hardly likely to receive a warm reception from the federal Tories, considering his relentless battles with Harper, whose apogee was undoubtedly his campaign during the last election to shut the Conservatives out of Newfoundland. Considering that Stephen Harper is even pettier and more vindictive than Danny himself, I would count the likelihood of him welcoming Danny to Ottawa at somewhere beneath absolute zero.

Ah, Danny—we hardly knew ye. Thanks for making politics interesting, if nothing else.

The gentrification of the living dead

2010-11-02T12:29:00.002-02:30

I was expecting to enjoy Sunday night's premiere of The Walking Dead on AMC; I was expecting to be impressed. I wasn't quite expecting to be as blown away as I was.

Seriously: based on the first episode, this is a very good show. It hits all the sweet spots: it is beautifully shot, extremely well acted, and—above all—well written. In fact (as far as last night's episode is concerned, at any rate) it far exceeds the source material. I realize this assertion will be seen as heretical by the comic book / graphic novel crowd, given that Robert Kirkman's Walking Dead series inspires nigh-fanatical reverence. Having read the first volume of the series, I must confess to be less than impressed with it: it is good, but often somewhat simplistic and heavy-handed in its storytelling, and crams in way too much exposition. The premise is solid, as it is concerned principally with the psychological state of a besieged collection of survivors as they travel a post-apocalyptic landscape in search of safe haven. The serial nature of the ongoing story allows for a much greater exploration of the characters than a film typically does, though I found many of the various conflicts, and the characters involved in them, to be overwrought and melodramatic, and frequently rather contrived.

What's good about the AMC adaptation (among other things) is that it pares away a lot of the graphic novel's narrative clutter, and settles itself into a comfortable, unrushed pacing. The first episode, "Days Gone By," ran for ninety minutes and did not hurry the story at all (anyone whose preference in the zombie genre is a lot of action and frequent scares, this is not for you). It opens with a kinetic car chase and gunfight, in which deputy sheriff Rick Grimes (Andrew Lincoln) gets shot. Then, in what feels like a nod to the opening of 28 Days Later, Rick wakes up in a deserted hospital after an indeterminate time spent in a coma. The world without has ended, and he walks around in shock, past bodies stacked like cordwood in the hospital parking lot. His first encounter with the living dead are as pale, dessicated fingers pushing through the cracks in a chained and barred hospital door daubed with the warning "DON'T OPEN DEAD INSIDE." He flees down a pitch dark stairwell, lighting his way with matches in a sequence that—in spite of the fact that nothing happens—is easily the scariest part of the first episode. He then finds his way out into the parking lot and past the stacked dead.

I won't rehash the episode; suffice to say the writers are smart enough to let the story tell itself and not burden us with excessive exposition. Though they follow the source material fairly closely, where they do take liberties is telling—they bring a nuance and depth to the characters that is lacking in the graphic novels, which is heartening, for it bodes well for how the series will progress. As mentioned, the story is character-driven, essentially acting like a thought experiment in survivor psychology. The zombies are actually incidental, to a large extent—they could be substituted for almost any other post-apocalyptic scenario, and so neither Kirkman in the original or the writers in this adaptation seem inclined to do anything funky with them or trope them specifically one way or another. The living dead are very much in the George A. Romero mode, slow-moving and not especially dangerous alone, but terrifying and inexorable in large groups. The series is going to do what high-end television from AMC and HBO does best: tell stories that unfold at their own pace, are not formulaic, and attract actors serious about their craft. Andrew Lincoln, who plays Rick, joins the ranks of British actors who put on American accents in such series (think of Dominic West and Idris Elba on The Wire, Ian McShane in Deadwood, Damian Lewis in Band of Brothers, Jamie Bamber in BSG, and of course the inimitable Hugh Laurie in House); I couldn't at first place where I knew him from, until someone reminded me that he was that guy in Love, Actually who made thousands of women swoon en masse with his cue-card declaration of love for Keira Knightly. And now he's wearing a southern accent and a stoic set to his jaw and killing the walking dead. Acting must be an interesting profession ...

What most impressed me about the premiere were the production values: AMC is sinking a lot of money into this series, and it shows. It was shot on sixteen-millimetre film, and they have veteran Oscar nominated director Frank Darabont producing. He directed the premiere, but doesn't seem to be slated to direct any of the other six episodes of season one—so I will be interested to see what the coming episodes look like, and whether there is a dip in quality. But for the record, episode one looked amazing. It was truly beautiful to watch, and had the kind of sequences you could easily teach in an intro to film class: the aforementioned hospital scenes, the dark stairwell, the horrifying parking lot littered with the dead, the car crash and gunfight that puts Rick Grimes in the hospital ... but perhaps most stunning is the sequence—shown in the trailers, and used in the advertising—in which Rick rides a horse into an apparently deserted and destroyed Atlanta.

Given that Darabont has made something of a career adapting Stephen King to film (The Shawshank Redemption, The Green Mile, The Mist) he seems quite well suited to helming such a macabre project. He has shown a talent not just for the scary and uncanny, but teasing out a nuanced understanding of how the scary and uncanny can warp and deform the human psyche.

Darabont's involvement also speaks to a larger issue with which I'm intrigued. My own preoccupation with zombies has been well documented on this blog (and I do promise one day to return to my Newfoundland zombie screenplay), but my recent presentation at the 2010 conference of the Canadian Association for American Studies was my first foray into an academic treatment of the living dead. One of the things attracting me to this is the critical mass of zombies in popular culture; and with a degree of saturation that suggests we'll soon be reaching genre burnout, the living dead have also partially emerged from the B-movie ghetto with a number of high-profile glossy films, as well as such accomplished treatments like 28 Days Later.

But in a twist that cultural critics probably wouldn't have predicted even ten years ago, it is the shift to television that is the hallmark of respectability. AMC has been carefully setting itself up as a rival to HBO, but because it lacks the same resources, it has had to very careful in its choices of original programming—and so far, it has not made a misstep. Mad Men, especially after this past season, is easily one of the best shows currently on the air (and a particular victory for AMC, as HBO passed on it); Breaking Bad I have not yet watched, but have never heard anything but glowing reviews of it; and likewise for Rubicon, which as a complex conspiracy thriller is something I should be watching, but there are only so many hours in the day.

With The Walking Dead, AMC is officially batting one thousand. I may be speaking too soon, but I doubt it—as long as the care that went into the premiere remains more or less consistent, the series promises to be really good.

An embarrassment of riches

2010-11-01T13:32:00.013-02:30

Well, it doesn't rain but it does something else. Basically I'm absent from this blog for nearly a month and a half, and then two post topics suggest themselves to me with great insistence.

Incidentally, the problem I was having with my Google account? Gone. I still have no idea what was going on, but it seems to have resolved itself. Also, I can finally compose posts in Firefox again, after months of Google Analytics not letting me access Blogger, and forcing me to do it in Explorer--which always sucked, because for some reason Explorer introduces random formatting changes while Firefox was a lot more sensible.

But it's all good again.

ANYWAY ... yes, long absence, and a critical mass of great posting topics. I was going to write my thoughts on The Walking Dead, which premiered last night, but will save that for tomorrow. Today, I want to comment on the weird and somewhat haughty criticism this past weekend's "Rally to Restore Sanity" has received in the press. This of course was The Daily Show's response to the hysterical rhetoric on both the left and the right that has reached absurd proportions. Deliberately lampooning Glenn Beck's August 28 rally on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial (on the anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I have a dream" speech, though Beck claimed that did not figure in on him choosing that day), Jon Stewart et al encouraged people to come out and be reasonable.

From the start, I thought this was a brilliant idea, and it was encouragingly well-received. The turnout apparently peaked at a quarter million, which nearly tripled that of Beck's. But it seemed as though the balance of those journalists passing comment on the event -- before and after -- were irked at Stewart's presumption, and wondered if this was the moment The Daily Show was jumping the shark (for a good roundup of the criticism, see the NYT Opinionator here).

I'm honestly at a bit of a loss to understand the almost uniform hostility to Stewart's rally. It is slightly reminiscent of his notorious turn on Crossfire, when he refused to play the role of funny man for Tucker Carlson and Paul Begala and instead enjoined them to "stop hurting America." Though that was at the time almost universally celebrated, six-odd years on, the press seems to have cooled on Stewart (and Stephen Colbert) stepping outside the strictly delimited comedy box.

I'm not entirely certain why, though if I had to guess I would say that "real" journalists have gotten touchy about the extent to which a large number of people look to The Daily Show for their news. A significant audience has become so thoroughly jaded by political journalism that satire is their truth; I think the angry, disappointed, and haughty dismissals of the Rally to Restore Sanity reflect more tellingly on a profession that is deeply aware of how much it has had to trade off in order to stay on life support, and does not much like being reminded of that fact.

Interestingly, in all the cases where I've read one of these critiques online, the comments have been almost uniform in their disagreement: this representative piece by Timothy Noah at Slate excited over six hundred responses, and I haven't found one that agrees with his argument.

Such a sampling does not of course prove anything, but at a moment when politics in the U.S. seems obsessed with a sort of faux-populism, it does suggest whose message does excite a populist response.

Also, the signs at the rally were hilarious:

Other favourites I read about: "All we are saying is give cheese some pants"; "Christine O'Donnell turned me into a newt"; and my personal favourite, "My wife thinks I'm hiking the Appalachian Trail."

Hmm.

2010-10-22T12:28:00.001-02:30

OK. This is just weird now.

Anyone else out there experiencing something similar?

This is just a test ...

2010-10-22T12:26:00.001-02:30

... of your emergency blogging system. Please do not be alarmed: if you are reading these words, I am still able to post to my blog. If you are not reading these words, then you should by all means panic.

Of course, I would have no means of telling you to panic, so if this post does not make it to my blog, I will be informing you all in 2-5 days of the need to panic by postcard.

For some reason, I cannot access my Google account, which means I can't get onto Blogger to edit my posts. Every time I try to log in, it sends me back to the login screen. Just by way of experimentation, I put in the wrong password, and it told me I had the wrong password. But the correct password blithely resets the login screen.

MS Word however has a blogging feature that allows you to post directly from your Word document without opening blogger. So that's what I'm going to try doing here.

Hopefully this works. But one way or another, as far as Blogger is concerned, I don't know what to do. This is Google. Do they have someone I can call?

Here goes ...

Housekeeping and stuff

2010-10-18T13:15:00.001-02:30

OK, I've been away from the blog for a while now, principally because—as I mentioned briefly in my previous post—this is the year I go up for tenure, and so most of September was given over to preparing my file, which was submitted on the first of October. Then I had to play catch-up with all the stuff (marking, mostly) that had had to be put off while the P/T file consumed my soul; then I had to write the conference paper I was presenting this past weekend at the annual CAAS conference in Windsor (and true to form, the paper was only satisfactorily completed about an hour before my panel in my hotel room).

So the long and the short of it is that the past month or so has essentially disappeared in a sleepless haze of grading and writing, and only now do I feel like I'm emerging—though that feeling, I fear, is illusory, as there is more grading in my immediate future and a glut of committee work. To say nothing of the fact that I am writing this blog post in minutes stolen between the solid raft of meetings with my first-year students I have today and tomorrow.

But I will take what I can get. I figure that before I get back to posting with quasi-regularity, I should do a bit of housekeeping here, cover some business that got missed in the past month.

1. Promotion and Tenure. Yes, I mentioned I'm up for promotion and tenure this year. But really, it's worth noting again. The compilation and assembly of my application and file represents one of the most tedious and yet anxiety-inducing—and not to say byzantine—things I have yet done in my academic career. To paraphrase Josh Lyman, the number of hoops I have to jump through before I can do whatever the hell I want is truly appalling.

2. Vampires Redux. I have been gently (and not so gently) prodded by some people about the unfinished vampire cage matches, which I have let hanging at the semifinals. We will return to them—this I promise.

3. Zombies, Redux. Perhaps I have drifted from my speculative battles between the undead because of my increasing preoccupation with the walking dead—way back in April I posted on the interesting upsurge in zombie films made since 9/11, apropos of working up a paper proposal for this year's CAAS (Canadian Association of American Studies) conference. I was very happy with that post, especially in terms of the discussion it generated. Well, as mentioned, the conference just happened this past weekend and I was very pleased with the paper's reception. I took a slightly different tangent than outlined in that post—or rather, I added a tangent, speaking first about zombies as the epitome of abjection, but also developing an argument suggesting that they also represent a creeping horror of mass culture.

4. Zombies, Redux redux. The end of October will see two banner events for fans of the zombie apocalypse. IFC will recast on North American television the brilliant British series Dead Set, in which the sole survivors of the zombie apocalypse are the contestants on Big Brother, barricaded as they are in their hermetically sealed set (Davina McCall, the British Big Brother host, guest stars as herself, and gets zombified right at the start). Though the set-up sounds comical, the series is actually quite terrifying, and very smart. Next, premiering on Halloween is the television adaptation of Robert Kirkman's graphic novel series The Walking Dead. As I mentioned in my paper this weekend, this is actually a very interesting development in the saga of the zombie genre: the network producing the series is AMC, which has also given us such critically acclaimed Mad Men, Breaking Bad, and Rubicon, and which has been assiduously setting itself up to rival HBO as the premier purveyor of quality television. That the zombie apocalypse is now valid subject matter for such a network suggests that, having achieved market saturation, the walking dead now move toward artistic respectability. Expect to see my reactions to The Walking Dead as they air ...

5. FlowTV. Speaking of respectability ... at the start of September, I was invited to become a regular columnist for an online media studies journal published out of the University of Texas at Austin called FlowTV. As it happens, one of the things that got the editors' attention was this blog—and so my first column, which went up on October 15, is a retread of one of my reality-TV posts. The journal likes lively discussion of its articles, so please go check it out and leave a comment.

Winter is (still) coming

2010-09-29T09:11:00.003-02:30

I'm currently in the throes of completing my promotion and tenure file (yes, it has been five years here ... weird), and so won't likely be posting until next week again at any length, but this I just had to share: the latest teaser for HBO's adaptation of George R. R. Martin's A Game of Thrones.

"Dark wings, dark tidings."

Frosty Friday

2010-09-24T10:54:00.002-02:30

There are some authors I sometimes feel the urge to dislike on general principle, but then I read something of theirs and must admit that the urge to dislike proceeds from a vague sense of the writer and has little or nothing to do with their actual writing. Margaret Atwood is one such author. Robert Frost is another.

Oh, don't get me wrong—I have nothing against Frost specifically, but his homespun, traditional, how-pastoral-is-New-England verse always seems so incredibly out of step with the raw modernist angst of a T.S. Eliot, or the playfulness and textual audacity of an e.e. cummings, or the thematic and metaphorical complexity and depth of a W.B. Yeats or W.H. Auden (as a side note, I've always wondered: modernists—what's with the initials?). By contrast, Frost at first glance seems quaint.

But then, if you actually pay attention to the poetry, you find darkness and ambivalence imbued in the rustic verses that belies their faux-naturalist, rocking-chair wisdom. There are exceptions to this, of course, the biggest example to me being the old favourite "The Road Not Taken"—which, besides its simplistically allegorical subject, always strikes me as nauseatingly self-congratulatory. (As an answer, I would pose Ellen Degeneres' great life lesson, "Don't take the beaten path. Unless you're lost in the woods, and then by all means, take the beaten path.")

At any rate, this is all apropos of reading, in my first-year class this week, what is about my favourite Robert Frost poem:

DESIGN

I found a dimpled spider, fat and white,
On a white heal-all, holding up a moth
Like a white piece of rigid satin cloth—
Assorted characters of death and blight
Mixed ready to begin the morning right,
Like the ingredients of a witches' broth—
A snow-drop spider, a flower like a froth,
And dead wings carried like a paper kite.

What had that flower to do with being white,
The wayside blue and innocent heal-all?
What brought the kindred spider to that height,
Then steered the white moth thither in the night?
What but design of darkness to appall?—
If design govern in a thing so small.

OK, basic stuff out of the way first: Petrarchan sonnet, rhymed ABBA ABBA ACAACC. The fact that Frost limited his choice of rhyme to three speaks to the poem's technical proficiency, but also wends an aural theme through on the A-rhyme that subverts the stereotypical conception of the purity or perfection of "white" with disease ("blight") and darkness ("night"). That he employs the sonnet form, especially a Petrarchan sonnet, is suggestive: a genre traditionally given over to a particular form of love poetry praising the specific features of one's beloved here frames an ambivalence or even revulsion at a particularly aesthetic brutality encountered in nature. Indeed, we don't lack for love sonnets that use the unalloyed beauty of nature as a useful analogy for the beauty of the beloved (Shakespeare's "Shall I Compare Thee to a Summer's Day?" for example), or which are more or less paeans to nature itself ("Upon Westminster Bridge" by William Wordsworth); Frost's sonnet here could itself almost be taken initially as such a poem, but for the mention of "death and blight" in line four, and the last line of the octet, which renders the lovely twinned images of the "snow-drop spider" and "flower like a froth" at best sinister, at the worst murderous.

But as I say to my students frequently, often a key to a poem's theme and meaning is in its title, and here "design" is the idea greeting us at the very outset and reappearing in the sestet's concluding couplet "What but design of darkness to appall?— / If design govern in a thing so small" as answer to the question of what could have caused this cruelly picturesque serendipity of white on white on white. "Design" is of course a loaded term, so bound up as it has been of late with creationism's stalking horse intelligent design—but the ostensible "design" of a benevolent creator has always been a point of faith and contention since before Darwin, and has given rise to such standard Sunday-school questions about the existence of evil in the world, or the purpose of pernicious animals from mosquitoes to great white sharks. The key repeated word in the sestet is the interrogative "What …?" which begins the ninth, eleventh, and thirteenth lines. What, indeed?

Those of us who view the universe as ordered by chance would likely describe the image the poem's central image as uncanny—which, to adapt Freud's definition of the term, refers to the familiar being rendered odd, disquieting, or eerie. The striking conjunction of white flower, spider, and moth is a splendid poetic coincidence (assuming Frost didn't invent it whole cloth, which, even if he did, hardly matters), for it highlights the brutal calculus of survival that makes a mockery of our sentimentalized conception of nature. (When bringing up this point in class yesterday, I used as an example the requisite five minutes in every television special on penguins in which we see them bloodily eaten by leopard seals or killer whales—not as poetic as Frost's image perhaps, but effective, because everyone loves penguins. I could also point to the fact that penguins will push each other off the ice to see if the water is safe).

Frost's theme here however has a significantly atheistic overtone, echoing the cri de coeur of all those who point to such cruelty as evidence of God's non-existence. Certainly, "Design" functions as a useful poetic rebuttal to the belief in an omnipotent, interventionist God whose hand is visible at all levels of creation, and without whose say-so nothing happens. Frost does however leave things in question: there is an ambiguity in the sestet, which while suggesting the absurdity of design, leaves the possibility open. That possibility is at best deeply ambivalent: if there is design at work, the poem suggests, it is of "darkness."

To return to an earlier point, the re-tasking of the sonnet form is one of the more interesting aspects (for me) of the poem: typically, the sonnet proceeds as a question and answer, with the octet posing a "problem" and the sestet rhetorically or symbolically resolving that problem. Something like ninety percent of love sonnets do the following: "Oh, my love is so beautiful; but she will age and wither and die; but I shall immortalize her in this poem so her beauty will live forever." (Yes, there's a reason people find poets somewhat self-absorbed). Frost does not invert that structure per se, but rather deliberately compounds the problem posed in the octet (i.e. the conjunction of flower, spider, moth) with his trio of rhetorical questions in the sestet. If we find any resolution, it is a deeply disquieting one, and encourages us rather to take comfort in the randomness of the universe.

After the flood all of the colours came out

2010-09-22T16:11:00.002-02:30

The U2 reference in my title here notwithstanding, much of Newfoundland did not wake to a particularly beautiful day this morning. Or rather, I should clarify, the weather was bright and sunny and the sky cloudless, but that just served to highlight the damage wrought by Hurricane Igor.

I really didn't appreciate the scale of the storm until driving to work this morning—almost all of the stoplights were still out in St. John's, and everywhere there were toppled trees and branches. My own experience of the hurricane was actually a bit anticlimactic—my power did not go out, and the storm did not feel too bad (some friends and colleagues reported today that they could feel their houses shift and groan in the wind, but either because of my location or for some other reason, there wasn't too much of that for me).

I was tempted once or twice to suit up and go out into the storm, simply to be able to say I had done so, but fortunately I was able to resist such a foolish impulse. I remember once seeing a stand-up comedian who talked about a man from his hometown in Florida, who went out to experience a level five hurricane, but tied himself to a tree so he would not be blown away. "Let me explain to you the way wind works: it's not you being blown away that's the problem. Tying yourself to a tree will not protect you from being hit by, say, a Buick."

So, yeah. I stayed inside.

The fallen trees were really the most spectacular form of damage here, though there were some floods here and there. The real brunt of the storm was borne by the Burin and Bonavista Penninsulas, where the flooding was most severe. Some more isolated towns were entirely cut off when bridges were washed out. If you haven't seen any of the footage, this video was taken in Clarenville:

Yikes.

Milestones of a sort

2010-09-17T15:05:00.001-02:30

It occurred to me this morning as I was driving to work that it was six years ago today that I defended my doctoral thesis. As with such sudden realizations at times, the memory of that day came flooding back rather powerfully. Perhaps it was because the memory came in the morning, while in the car, that the first thing I remembered was nearly being in a car accident en route to campus.

The defence was scheduled for one o'clock, and my original intention had been to sleep in, relax in my apartment and just chill until almost noon. Of course, that didn't happen—I woke at 5am, wide awake, though I resolutely stayed in bed until almost seven before sheer nerves drove me up. I made coffee, tried watching TV, tried playing a video game, tried, even (so quixotically) to read ... but nothing was working, so instead of pacing around my small apartment I gave in and drove to school a little after nine-thirty.

When I was halfway, I was very nearly t-boned by a guy running a stop sign. I screeched to a halt, he screeched to a halt, inches away from each other, and he made apologetic gestures. He must have been a bit confused that I wasn't looking or gesticulating at him, but rather had my face turned upward and was shaking my fist at the roof of my car. What I was actually shouting was "No, Universe! Not today, you don't!"

Anyway, I made it up unscathed, and the rest is now history. The whole defence, as it happens, turned out to be a rather enjoyable affair—the examination committee was quite impressed with my thesis, and we all had fun hashing out some of the ideas and issues I'd written about. Turns out that when you spend several years researching and writing a 300+ page project, you actually become the authority in the room on the subject. Who knew?

Fortuitously, that afternoon there was a departmental function at the Grad Club, a meet and greet for faculty and grad students. We all had name tags printed on white stickers ready for us, and to this day one of my fondest moments was when M.J. Kidnie, a relatively new hire with whom I had struck up a good friendship, running over with a pen to strike out "PhD Candidate" under my name and write "Dr." in front of it.

The, um, rest of the departmental function and my defence party that evening are sort of vague in my memory.

Randomness for a Wednesday afternoon

2010-09-15T15:19:00.001-02:30

Best sentence to be taken out of context I've read all week, from a discussion between Gail Collins and David Brooks in today's New York Times: "Everyone is enthusiastic about the migration of beautiful young women, but the attitude toward a mile-long stack of walruses along the coast is more mixed."

In the same column, the smartest thing David Brooks has ever put in print, viz. his theory that Sarah Palin is actually a Democratic saboteur: "That's the only plausible explanation for the last two years. First she charms John McCain, gets into his campaign and promptly extinguishes any chance he had of winning the presidency in 2008. Then she leads large sections of the G.O.P. into an intellectual cul de sac." Makes me wonder if I've been reading Palin all wrong this whole time. Don't retreat, Sarah Barracuda ... reload!

In wingnut news, you know how sometimes creationists and climate change deniers liken themselves to Galileo—characterizing themselves as lonely truth-speakers persecuted and silenced by the powers that be? Well, Robert A. Sungenis and Robert J. Bennett have gone a step further with their book Galileo Was Wrong: The Church Was Right. (The title is to the point, at least). The publisher's blurb describes the book as "a detailed and comprehensive treatise that demonstrates from the scientific evidence that heliocentrism (the concept that the Earth rotates on its axis and revolves around the sun) is an unproven scientific theory; and that geocentrism (the view that the Earth is in the center of the universe and does not move by either rotation or revolution) is not only supported by the scientific evidence but is admitted to be a logical and viable cosmology by many of the world's top scientists, including Albert Einstein, Ernst Mach, Edwin Hubble, Fred Hoyle and many more."

As writers as disparate as Christopher Hitchens and Michael Berubé have pondered of creationism, why take such specific issue with the theory of evolution when, really, the Big Bang would really be the theory to take down if you want to demonstrate that the earth is only 6014 years old? Well, here's the granddaddy of all intelligent design polemics, written by the president of Catholic Apologetics International and someone who "has been an instructor of physics and mathematics for many years at various academic institutions." You don't say—"various academic institutions"? One wonders how many, and how long he lasted at each ...

Also, a question from the floor: don't Catholics have enough to be apologetic about (internationally) these days without trying to take down Galileo? And Kepler? And Isaac Newton?

As my friend Julia observed, the really scary thing is that the book made it into a second edition

Poetry break: William Carlos Williams

2010-09-12T21:35:00.006-02:30

I promised, or rather hinted some time back that as I prep my intro English course for the term, I might introduce some poetry periodically onto this humble blog.

This afternoon has been mostly dedicated to prepping this week's material for English 1080: Critical Reading and Writing I, the English course that every single Memorial student must take, and which I had a bit of a hard time with last year. As I droned on about in that previous post on this subject, getting first-year students to read poetry seriously—and think about it substantively—is not at all unlike getting little kids to eat their vegetables—assuming that said little kids have been indoctrinated into believing that vegetables are actually poisonous.

But I soldier on, both because I do in fact firmly believe that learning to read poetry is a valuable thing in and of itself, and because I love the damn stuff too much not to. A colleague of mine the other day told me he no longer does poetry in 1080 any longer, because he can't stand having stuff he loves disdained and mistreated. I'm not quite there myself, but I'll keep you posted.

At any rate, as I was compiling my syllabus, I pulled out my collected William Carlos Williams to find a poem not in my anthology that I wanted to use ("Landscape With the Fall of Icarus"), and came across the following little gem:

Labrador

How clean these shallows
how firm these rocks stand
about which wash
the waters of the world

It is ice to this body
that unclothes its pallors
to thoughts
of an immeasurable sea,

unmarred, that as it lifts
encloses this
straining mind, these
limbs in a single gesture.

I read this, and think "William Carlos Williams visited Labrador?" What followed was one of those flurries of activity that was, essentially, a distraction from the work I needed to do, but which felt like productive research. As it turns out, Williams visited Newfoundland and Labrador in 1933 on a cruise with his wife. That relatively short—two weeks—vacation left an impression. The cruise took them up the west coast, as far north as St. Anthony's. I found some references to this in William Carlos Williams: A New World Naked, a biography by Paul Mariani. My favourite bit:

"How alien this world seemed. Still, Williams had sworn had sworn he would swim in these northern waters and had taken off—alone—for the north end of the island. There he found only puffins and water so cold he could hardly believe it. Nevertheless, he did manage to dip beneath the surface … and to gash his stomach on the shelly bottom before he scrambled for shore. At least he'd come into intimate contact with the primitive elements of that place."

I'm thinking that Williams' Newfoundland connection is something to explore at greater length, especially considering that he apparently came back on a few occasions (visits my relatively cursory research did not reveal). Speaking to a senior colleague about this at a start-of-term mixer, I discovered that not only had Williams returned several times, but that the senior colleague in question got pissed as a newt with the man. Huh. The oral history here needs uncovering, I think.

But to return to the poem in question, I find Williams' primitivism interesting. He is, to a certain extent, falling into what I tend of think of as the Group of Seven cliché—the reductive association of the north with what Williams' biographer calls "the primitive elements of that place." Perhaps I've simply read too much CanLit that mythologizes the north as somehow pure and clean, a space in which the human soul can test itself (Farley Mowat being public enemy number one in this respect), but it does get a little repetitive after a time. That Williams "had sworn had sworn he would swim in these northern waters" is unsurprising—his poetic philosophy was "no ideas but in things," and focused his writing on the concrete, the tactile, and the tangible, and loathed such over-intellectualized poetry as T.S. Eliot's (Williams called The Waste Land a "catastrophe" for American letters). I didn't know he had the Hemingwayesque tendency toward extremes of physicality, but it's a little endearing. Better him than me swimming in Newfoundland waters, is all I have to say. Wading ankle-deep at Middle Cove beach is about as much as I can handle.

Williams was one of the premier "imagists," one of a group of modernist poets who desired to ground poetry in concrete things. His most famous poem, which most people encounter in high school (and which is one of the first things I'll be doing in 1080) is "The Red Wheelbarrow," a deceptively simple, seemingly descriptive work:

so much depends
upon

a red wheel
barrow

glazed with rain
water

beside the white
chickens.

Much of Williams' poetry lies in the lyricism of such simple, parochial things. Ironically, this can make him a difficult poet to teach: while students are generally reluctant to engage with poetry, they nevertheless tend to have a sense of poetry as something somehow elevated or rarefied, and when presented with Williams' insistence on simplicity they dismiss it. It's not that they are more at home with the complex interplay of themes in a John Donne poem, but at least with Donne they find the opacity and archaism they stereotypically associate with poetry.

"Labrador" is, in many ways, an exemplary Williams work—the first thing one notices is its simplicity and symmetry, moving from the image of the rocky shore, to a more complex connection between the chill waters and the self, to that amazing final stanza that collapses the distinction between the self and the vast ocean. Though I've already taken issue with Williams' replication of the northerly mythos, I must say he phrases it in rather an elegant and, for all the vividness of the imagery, nebulous fashion. He transmutes the specificity of place—we know from the title where the speaker is, and that first stanza's description of the rocky shore is striking—into a universal, citing at first the universality of the ocean ("the waters of the world"). The second stanza gives us particularity again in "this body," but makes that key connection to "thoughts / of an immeasurable sea." One thinks here of Jung's metaphor for the unconscious as an ocean—though I somehow doubt Williams had much use for psychoanalysis (not a point I'm familiar with one way or another), the sea certainly becomes an image of connection and universality. The wrinkle in a Jungian reading is that it is uncertain whether the speaker is concerned with other people, or his connection to a primal natural state, or simply nature itself. My own reading is the latter: the freezing ocean in this poem appears indifferent to the shocks it visits on the frail human body. The gesture, rather, is the speaker's offering to the sea, which accepts the sacrifice with a sublime magnanimity.

Again, it is the symmetry of the poem that is striking: three short stanzas, the first of which frames the setting; the second, which while speaking of the poet's body, moves into somewhat vaguer and more abstract language and generalizations; and the third, at once the most moving and the most opaque. I always remember the professor in the one creative writing course I ever took stressing that poetry moved from the concrete to the abstract: "Love might be your topic," she was fond of saying, "but NEVER use the word love." We might have used "Labrador" as a case study: that final stanza is beautifully cryptic, but would be useless if Williams had not given us the vivid image of the Labrador coast in the first.

So what is that final stanza saying? What is it doing? I have to imagine I've been Googled by some of my new students, who found their way to this blog—please, tell me what you think.

Thoughts on (my) New Year’s Eve

2010-09-06T21:33:00.001-02:30

As I have blogged many times in the past (at least once a year, it seems to me), for me the new year starts not on January first, but the day after Labour Day. My entire life since the age of about four has been tied to the rhythms of the school year, and when I recall important events in my life I don't think "Oh, that happened in fall of 1986" or "I did that in 2003," I think "that happened in grade nine" and "I did that in year six of my PhD." January first—and its drunken sibling, December 31^st—always feel anticlimactic to me, and I have disliked New Year's Eve for reasons I never articulated to myself until my friend Gregg did it for me. In one of his many moments of earthy wisdom, he observed that there are two days a year we are under great pressure to enjoy: the first is our birthday, the second is New Year's. Birthdays are easy, if you have good friends and/or family, and don't get too freaked out about aging—the day is all about you. But as Gregg sagely observed, New Year's Eve is everybody's birthday, and the every-man-for-himself partying that happens often carries a tinge of desperation.

And for me, it's not the true beginning of the year. One of the things I love about my job is that I remain plugged into this annual cycle in which, as you come off the heat and languor of the summer, you look forward to the crisp weather of autumn and the energy of a new school year. Northrop Frye, in his magisterial work on archetypes in literary archetypes, associates autumn with "myths of the fall, dying gods, violent death and sacrifice" and the isolation of the hero, with tragedy and elegy as its representative genres. I like to imagine however that this was at odds with what Frye, a lifelong academic, experienced on a yearly basis—knowing that these archetypes are rooted in our mythic and agrarian origins, but that September for us bookish scholastic types evokes feelings of renewal and rebirth. Autumn, in other words, is the academic's spring.

At any rate, I've been lax on this blog for the last three weeks or so, and hope to rectify that as the term begins. To all those about to begin a school year, I salute you.

Prop 8 and paradigms

2010-08-13T11:55:00.003-02:30

Victor Hugo famously said that there is no stronger force than an idea whose time has come. I think we're witnessing that right now.

I came across two interesting comments on the Prop-8 ruling, and the Ross Douthat column I discussed in my previous post. One was actually a comment on the other—Andrew Sullivan quoting Ezra Klein—but I thought his brief observation was rather insightful, and it made me think. The key Klein passage:

America does not currently conceive of marriage in the way that Douthat … would like it to conceive of marriage, and in the way it would need to conceive of marriage in order for there to be a good reason the institution can't accommodate gays. So to oppose gay marriage, Douthat … must first construct an alternative version of marriage, and then argue that if real marriage opens to gays, that's another step away from the idealized marriage that would be closed to gays.

It's like partisans of VCRs opposing improvements to DVDs because they make the widespread resurrection of VHS unlikely.

I liked this analogy a lot, in part because it got me thinking about paradigm shifts. Sullivan's comment got my mind working in similar ways: "It seems to me that we are witnessing the much faster collapse of the anti-gay marriage case - on logic and public opinion - that almost anyone anticipated. It is as if suddenly, one consensus has imploded and another begun."

Thomas Kuhn's theory of paradigms works along much this same reasoning: that societal change is not gradual, but tends to happen with remarkable speed when it happens, and one dominant world-view will be eclipsed by another apparently all at once. Basically, what we witness is the inertia of accepted wisdom being overcome by incremental change that has gathered weight and force until it can no longer be withstood. What seemed timeless and enduring can suddenly no longer stand.

Even just a decade ago, gay marriage was considered a possibility but decades away from broad social acceptance; two decades ago it was unthinkable but for a tiny minority. Resistance to the idea is still strong, but waning fast; the strongest signal of this shift is less its vocal advocacy than mainstream indifference, which suggests more than anything a fait accompli. I'd like to think that we've reached that historical tipping-point.

Taking encouragement from odd sources

2010-08-10T11:32:00.002-02:30

Just a few days ago, Proposition 8 was struck down in California, making gay marriage again legal in that state. The court case leading to this decision has been fascinating, and Judge Vaughn Walker's ruling will likely stand as a milestone decision in the history of human rights.

There are many, many aspects of this decision that are encouraging about the mainstreaming of the presence of gays and lesbians in contemporary culture. I want to cite two of them today.

Here's one: the principal lawyer in the team arguing against Prop 8 was Ted Olson, a conservative most famous for representing George W. Bush in Bush v. Gore 2000. Olson did an extraordinary job of taking down Prop 8 on its constitutional flaws, and we see his mad skillz here in an interview with Fox News' Chris Wallace:

That this former Bush proponent can argue so eloquently for the right of gay marriage doesn't encourage me so much because he's a conservative taking a stereotypically non-conservative position, as that the intellectual basis for his constitutional argument is so solid. Don't get me wrong: I'm always happy to see conservatives endorse socially liberal philosophy, but it's comforting to see so strong a vindication of a secular humanist reading of the U.S. constitution.

The second thing to which I want point was Ross Douthat's editorial the day before yesterday in the NY Times. It was a little garbled. From what I can gather, he attempted to articulate his opposition to gay marriage by way of a defence of heterosexual monogamy as something somehow exceptional. He writes:

The point of this ideal is not that other relationships have no value, or that only nuclear families can rear children successfully. Rather, it's that lifelong heterosexual monogamy at its best can offer something distinctive and remarkable — a microcosm of civilization, and an organic connection between human generations — that makes it worthy of distinctive recognition and support ... But if we just accept this shift, we're giving up on one of the great ideas of Western civilization: the celebration of lifelong heterosexual monogamy as a unique and indispensable estate. That ideal is still worth honoring, and still worth striving to preserve. And preserving it ultimately requires some public acknowledgment that heterosexual unions and gay relationships are different: similar in emotional commitment, but distinct both in their challenges and their potential fruit.

To my mind, it's the bit suggesting "lifelong heterosexual monogamy" is "a microcosm of civilization" that makes this art. Seriously? This would be less absurd a claim if he had not already, in the name of acknowledging certain anti-gay-marriage arguments as wrong-headed, dispensed with a clutch of their standards in his opening paragraph. For example, he cites the old saw that "Marriage is an ancient institution that has always been defined as the union of one man and one woman, and we meddle with that definition at our peril." These arguments, he admits, "have lost because they're wrong."

They may be wrong by Douthat's own admission, but he then essentially advances the same argument by different means. The argument by way of nature doesn't work, he acknowledges; anyone claiming homosexuality as unnatural must needs account for genetic and biological evidence, to say nothing of the Central Park Zoo's homosexual penguins. So he reverts to an argument by way of civilization. Heterosexual monogamy, he further acknowledges, is unnatural in itself: "If 'natural' is defined to mean 'congruent with our biological instincts,' it's arguably one of the more unnatural arrangements imaginable." However—and here is his basic point—it is in its unnaturality that heterosexual monogamy deserves to be enshrined and protected, as it is the basis of Western civilization: it is in fact, to repeat his words, "one of the great ideas of Western civilization."

I'm not really sure where to begin here. Maybe pointing out that heterosexual marriage was not the sole provenance of Western civilization—I'm pretty sure ancient Chinese and Indian cultures practised something comparable. Secondly: dude, have you read Plato's Symposium? If there's any consensus on what the cradle of Western democratic and humanistic ideals was, ancient Athens is kind of it. And, um, not to put too fine a point on it—but they did quite love their man-on-man encounters, to the point where Plato (he to whom all of Western philosophy is but a footnote, remember) enshrined it as the most perfect expression of aesthetic love. Also, Sappho—let's not forget Sappho either.

But really, that kind of nitpicking (as fun as it is) is kind of beside the point. The point is the sheer incoherence of Douthat's piece. It reads as the flailing of a conservative thinker—a religious conservative at that—who on one hand is too intelligent to accept the standard anti-gay arguments but also cannot abandon the basic precepts of his faith and political convictions. Which leads to a kind of desperate re-framing of the issue: same-sex marriage isn't the natural order of things, but it's a great idea we abandon at our own peril—much like school prayer. Or white presidents.

Of course, once Douthat acknowledges same-sex marriage as an idea among other ideas, he cedes the absolutist ground on which the Right tends to frame the issue of marriage—kind of like how those Biblical passages "proving" the earth's centrality had to be re-read as allegorical in the face of the Copernican Revolution, or legislative racism gave way before the U.S. constitution's basic promise of human rights. There's still a long way to go, but it's always comforting to have indicators of hope.

In praise of arbitrary milestones

2010-08-06T19:02:00.004-02:30

As heralded several days ago, this is the five hundredth post to this humble bog. Given that this blog also recently celebrated its five anniversary, that means that over the last five years I have published posts at an average rate of once every 3.68 days. Not too shabby.

I'd drink champage if I had it. I don't, so I'll settle for a Friday afternoon cocktail. I will sip it and think of you, my readers. Slainte!

More Big Love ruminations, or, No Mormons were harmed in the writing of this post

2010-08-04T18:29:00.002-02:30

We've made it to the end of season three of Big Love, and while it got a little uneven over the last few episodes, overall I still have to give the series a big thumbs up. I've been pounding out some notes on the various points of interest the series has—academically speaking—for potential articles; there are a variety of tangents I can take, but the one that occurred to me today is the weird incongruity between the kind of shows HBO has become known for, and the basic content of Big Love. To put it another way: HBO has always taken advantage of its freedom as a pay station to depict things like nudity and profanity, stuff you can't get away with on regular cable. Indeed, HBO series take transgression to a new level, with the very nearly Shakespearian potty mouths of Deadwood, or the frequent graphic gay sex of Oz.

Big Love, on the other hand, depicts deeply religious and self-consciously decent people for whom swearing is about as unthinkable as taking a drink. The most offensive the language gets are with such foul ejaculations as "Oh, my heck!" and "What the H are you thinking?" (come to think of it, the phrase "foul ejaculations" would probably cause serious upset within the Henrickson clan). To those familiar with the blue language of The Wire and Deadwood, Big Love is almost shocking for its propriety. I amuse myself sometimes imagining a crossover episode that would make Jimmy McNulty a house guest of the Henricksons.

Which made me ponder: is this how HBO now gives us edgy content? There's a great Calvin and Hobbes cartoon in which Calvin shows Hobbes how he offends his parents with his music: elevator music, played very softly. When you have very secular and liberal sensibilities, when you grew up listening to industrial music or gangsta rap (or both), what exactly do your children have to do to earn your disapprobation? Christian rock and a membership in the Young Conservatives?

I say this of course with my tongue in my cheek, but one of the things I like about Big Love is that it does not depict the Henricksons' religious devotion ironically (which might be the series more subtle irony, but I will come to that). On the contrary, the characters are quite earnest in their faith. To be sure, there are some comic moments (usually involving Nicki) where the tenets of Mormon fundamentalism appear risible, but the show lets Bill and his clan be sincere in their beliefs with a minimum of implicit critique.

That being said, it is hard to avoid the fact that HBO's prevailing demographic is a university-educated, largely secular and liberal audience—an audience likely to be at least sceptical of such religious fervour as depicted on the show, at most dismissive or hostile. I can of course only proceed from my own subjective response to the show, but I have to imagine that there are many viewers of a similar mindset to mine: who like the Henricksons as characters, but also view this world—not just the polygamists' world, but a social context in which one's adherence to the Mormon Church (or any church) is an arbiter of one's social virtue—is utterly alien. Indeed, one of the most interesting thematic points of Big Love, and something I suspect mitigates the Henricksons' lifestyle for a liberal audience, is the fact that the social condemnation of polygamy proceeds not from an abhorrence of such a crushingly patriarchal system, but from the dogma of the Church of Latter Day Saints. Polygamy, originally a basic tenet of the Mormon Church, was officially disavowed in 1890 by church president Wilson Woodruff under Congressional pressure. The prejudice against the Henricksons seems to be less a matter of intellectual distinction than pious adherence to church doctrine, and the church itself functions on the show as a panoptical entity with a constant disapproving eyebrow cocked at anyone not vigorously active in church activity. (In season one, the church distributes colour-coded street maps to neighbourhoods indicating which homes are "active" and which ones are "inactive"; Nicki, whose dress and demeanour identify her as a fundamentalist, has her house blacked out).

The series also fosters an understanding of Mormonism, and the Henricksons' heretical offshoot, only gradually—and it was only in the third season that the theological underpinnings of polygamy and the history of the LDS Church came into focus. Again speaking from a subjective position here, this has the effect of introducing the loonier aspects of Mormonism only when you have an emotional investment in these characters. To wit: in the 1820s in western New York, Joseph Smith Jr. (who had been previously arrested several times for grifting and scamming people) announced that he had, after three visitations from the Angel Moroni, discovered two gold plates that told the story of the origins of those living in America and the truth of the Gospels. He also had two magical stones that, when fashioned into eyeglasses, allowed him to translate the plates. In the course of about two months, dictating from behind a curtain (he refused to show the plates to anyone, but needed a scribe as he was himself illiterate), Smith produced about 500 pages of what was to become The Book of Mormon. Persecution from locals hostile to the self-styled prophet and his followers led to a protracted journey across the U.S., during which Joseph Smith was killed in Illinois in another altercation with locals (leaving behind thirty-two wives). The "saints" were ultimately led to the Salt Lake by Smith's lieutenant Brigham Young, where they established the geographical home of the LDS Church. Mormonism continues to be today one of the world's fastest-growing religions, boasting such congregants as Mitt Romney and Glenn Beck.

The principle behind polygamy—simply referred to as "The Principle" on Big Love—is the belief that the family you have in the temporal world is with you in the "Celestial Kingdom," the highest and most blessed plane of the afterlife, and that it is one's moral obligation to grow the temporal family as much as possible in order to obtain a more blessed afterlife. Hence, all of the difficulties faced by the Henrickson clan in maintaining and growing their family—and the pursuit of a family structure abhorrent to secularists because of its basis in an egregious paternalism and patriarchal imperative—are undertaken in the name of an arcane religious doctrine that I'm fairly certain seems not just odd to the HBO demographic, but actively delusional and quasi-insane. Which, I would argue, is where the series develops its subtle irony—dramatic irony, as it were, as the audience watches Bill et al subject themselves to a host of difficulties for reasons they find, at the very least, unnecessary.

The insularity of the world depicted on Big Love also contributes, I believe, to its dramatic appeal to a largely secular audience. Though not harping on this point, both the polygamists and the mainstream Mormons make it clear that those not baptized into the LDS Church are damned—or at least definitively excluded from eternal joy in the Celestial Kingdom. Hence, though we may find the Henricksons endearing, we have little reason to be sympathetic to an exclusive religious doctrine that so emphatically shuts out not just non-Christians and non-believers, but the vast majority of Christians as well. The incursions of secular perspectives are few and far between, and were the show to consistently stage the conflict as between religion and secularism, I certainly know I would find it a lot more difficult to sympathize with the Henricksons and their fellow-travellers. To put it simply, I'd have a dog in the hunt, whereas in its current form I find myself sufficiently outside the show's context to be at once more objective and also more emotionally involved with the main characters.

As a final thought, I would argue that the great value of Big Love is the fact that it offers a subtle but trenchant critique of religious doctrine and the nuclear family portraying both taken to their illogical extremes. The disturbing, cultish quality of the compound-living fundamentalists is contrasted with the modern sheen of the contemporary LDS—but as already mentioned, the mainstream LDS Church is itself portrayed as oppressive and prejudiced, and besides which sharing the bizarre origin story of the self-styled latter-day Mohammed, Joseph Smith Jr. The thought that occurs to me however when reading the Smith narrative is that the only thing that really makes it more unbelievable than any other religious origin story is its proximity to us in time—it lacks the aura of authenticity bestowed upon other religions' starting-points because it emerges not in mythic time, but in years recent enough for us to read about Smith's arrests for grifting in the New York newspapers of the day.

Similarly, the contrast between the Henricksons' shiny modern suburban life and the rustic, rudimentary pioneer-village of the fundamentalist compound is a visual cue that identifies them more closely with television's standard depictions of the nuclear family. Throughout the first season, Big Love generally depicts the Henricksons as happy and balanced family unit that who would have a perfect life if only the rest of the world wasn't prejudiced against them. This happiness is however increasingly shown to be a facade, with the cracks showing as various family members chafe against the asymmetries of what is ultimately shown to be a rigidly hierarchical system. Though Bill himself at first seems like a veritable paradigm of masculine responsibility, generosity, and, yes, liberality, he increasingly comes to assert the absolute authority of the patriarch and make recourse to doctrinal justification for that authority. In the process, the traditional model of the nuclear family suffers by comparison: the "father knows best" model, which as I've suggested in previous posts is a television staple, ultimately appeals to the same logic of innate masculine authority.

OK, much longer post than I'd planned. Still ... thoughts?

Summer reading

2010-08-01T02:32:00.003-02:30

It is August already, and just as I always do at this point in the summer, I wonder where the hell the last few months went. The school year is just around the corner, and many of the things I had planned to get done by this point are still, well, piled up in the on-deck circle.

On the other hand, I have done an awful lot of reading—most of it research-related, but a lot of it has also been purely for pleasure (though this is one of the benefits of being an English professor whose area of specialization is contemporary: more than a few titles listed here have article potential. Any guesses which ones?) Here are the highlights:

Benjamin Black, Christine Falls and The Silver Swan.

Benjamin Black is the nom de plume for Booker-winning Irish novelist John Banville, who took up the new moniker so that he could write detective fiction. Not that there is much in the way of deception, considering that the author bio begins "Benjamin Black is the pen name of acclaimed author John Banville ..." and features Banville's recognizable mug quite prominently. I guess he wanted to make it clear that genre fiction was just a hobby. At any rate, the novels are quite good, and excellent antidotes to those who want to romanticize living in Ireland—they take place in 1950s Dublin, and more than anything else are atmospheric evocations of a grimy, impoverished and pettishly puritanical culture. Black/ Banville's "detective" is a broken down, quasi-alcoholic pathologist named Quirke who finds himself embroiled in mysteries that he sort of half-assedly investigates. The attraction of these novels is not in Quirke's talents as an investigator (he is, frankly, rather inept), so anyone hoping for a Miss Marple or Hercule Poirot will be disappointed. And while he's a hard-drinking ladies' man, Quirke lacks the edge of a Sam Spade, given that he sort of muddles through things. Call it soft-boiled detective fiction, and enjoy it for Banville/ Black's glorious prose.

Terry Pratchett, Unseen Academicals.

I have written about my love for Sir Terry's parodic fantasy fiction several times on this blog. His wit and intelligence are always impressive, but his sheer productivity is mind-numbing. Unseen Academicals is his thirty-seventh Discworld novel (with number thirty-eight due out in the fall). Impressive for anyone—doubly impressive for someone battling Alzheimer's. I had the good fortune to read Unseen Academicals during the World Cup; this Discworld instalment is all about the ancient game of Foote-the-Ball and the changes the game adopts when it becomes imperative for the wizards of Unseen University to field a team and play the local thugs of the city of Ankh-Morpork. If you're utterly confused by this premise, you are obviously a Discworld virgin; I suggest you remedy that, and soon. Unseen Academicals has all the usual components of a Pratchett novel: sharp satire, absurd humour, a colourful yet deeply sympathetic (for the most part) cast of characters, and a multilayered storyline that never quite goes in the direction you expect. Highly recommended for the initiated.

John R. Hale, Lords of the Sea: The Epic Story of the Athenian Navy and the Birth of Democracy.

Triremes! Sea battles! Brilliant Greek names like Themistocles, Pericles, Thrasybulus, and Demosthenes! I picked this book up on a whim at the UWO bookstore, out of a general fascination with ancient Greek and military history, and couldn't put it down. Hale is a brilliant historian—from my brief investigation of the guy's scholarly cred, he is pretty much the authority on ancient navies. And Vikings. But for my purposes, he also is an amazing storyteller. This book takes you from just before the first Persian War up to the death of Alexander the Great, and shows how Athens and its democratic legacy was basically made possible by its navy.

Jo Walton, Farthing and Ha'Penny.

These are two old-style English murder mysteries set in an alternative history in which England negotiated a truce with Hitler in 1941. I was surprised at first with how unobtrusive the alternative historical context was: it really does sort of fade into the background in Farthing, but with Ha'Penny Walton makes it increasingly prevalent. The effect is somewhat insidious: before you know it, you are taken out of the comfortable familiarity of the genteel English mystery and made to face an all-too-possible alternative history in which the blight of Nazism has not been eliminated from Europe and Britain is slowly but inexorably sliding into fascism itself. The third book of the trilogy, Half a Crown, I have not yet been able to lay my hands on.

Richard K. Morgan, Market Forces and Broken Angels.

Some of you will remember my post on Richard K. Morgan's Black Man back in May, something made rather remarkably memorable by the fact that Morgan himself responded to my criticisms of his novel in my comments section. This precipitated a great back-and-forth over email between me and the man himself, with the tentative promise of an interview that—ideally—I can shop to an SF journal in conjunction with an article on his novels. In the interests of said article, I needed to read the two Morgan books I hadn't yet got around to. Unfortunately, publishers have not been cooperating with me this summer: it seems that all the books I want to get are out of print or out of stock, or (in the case of the two Morgan books in question) only available in audio format. Fortunately, my good friend Tim Blackmore here at UWO (who was obliquely responsible for me discovering Morgan to begin with) came to my rescue with a loaner of the two novels in question. All of which is an account of everything but the books themselves. So: Market Forces is exactly one half of an extrapolative dystopia (which may well be a redundant term), depicting a future in which high-stakes capitalism literally entails killing to get ahead, and which overtly profits from conflicts in the developing world. This much is good; the Mad Max-style combat between corporate ladder-climbers—in which they do battle in souped-up cars on the highway—is out of step with the general intellectual seriousness of the rest of the novel. Broken Angels is the second of the three Takeshi Kovacs novels, and exhibits the same fusion of hard-boiled detective fiction and cyberpunk of the other two.

Isaac Asimov, Foundation.

Here's my two-part SF heresy: (1) I had never read Asimov's classic Foundation until this summer, and (2) I was totally underwhelmed by it. Even taking into account my belated encounter with it, having read a slew of contemporary SF classics that have all profited from Asimov's playbook, it felt pretty thin to me. Now, the overall concept, of a massive galactic empire in decay and the efforts of a group of scholars to preserve civilization through the inevitable crash and dark age that follows, is positively visionary. But the actual story that told was, well, insufficient to the promise of that concept. Granted, I have yet to read the subsequent Foundation novels, but the quality of the storytelling itself was disappointing enough to not make me enthusiastic about reading them. I'm sure I will at some point, for the simple need to cover my SF bases, but it is not currently high on my priority list.

Joe Abercrombie, The Blade Itself and Before They Are Hanged.

Speaking of the weird caprices of publishing this summer: after having The Blade Itself recommended to me a few years ago by a fellow fantasy enthusiast, I finally got around to picking it up this summer. I quite enjoyed it: it is a great story of, among other things, the world-weariness of those whose life is lived by the blade. The alternative world evoked is quite vivid, and the characters well realized. I avidly picked up book number two, Before They Are Hanged, but have not been able to lay hands on Last Argument of Kings ... for reasons passing understanding, the first two are readily available but the third has effectively vanished from this earth. Adding insult to injury, Abercrombie's most recent novel (which seems to take place in the same world some twenty years later) is also on the shelves.

Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner.

Did anyone else find this novel way overrated? For a while after it first came out, it seemed to be all anyone could talk about. I'd heard its brilliance praised to the skies by many people whose opinions I respect, and so had always meant to get around to reading it. Well, I finally did ... and was waiting for that storytelling or technical brilliance to appear. Not so much. I found the story generally engaging, if a bit pedestrian, and the dramatic sequences really rather contrived. It kind of had all the set-pieces a western audience expects of a novel set in Afghanistan, with little to question, complicate, or challenge those assumptions.

Cormac McCarthy, Child of God.

I love love love Cormac McCarthy, and ever have since first reading Blood Meridian. It's a bit of a truism to call him William Faulkner's heir apparent—on one hand, I think that is true (him and Toni Morrison), but at the same time he's marked out his own thematic and stylistic territory. He stumbled a bit with All The Pretty Horses, but The Crossing and Cities of the Plain more than made up for that. And then, No Country for Old Men. And then ... The Road. B'Jaysus, of the handful of novels I've read that have left me metaphorically in the fetal position from sheer emotional exhaustion, that one is certainly in the top three. Anyway, I realised this summer I had not read any of his three earliest novels, and on the recommendation of s student decided to start with Child of God. And ... phew. OK, Cormac—I'm seeing some of your later fiction here, some of your key themes and tropes, but not with the subtlety and nuance you learn. Child of God is set in Tennessee mountain country and follows the exploits of Les Ballard, who may or may not be developmentally challenged. Les basically descends into increasingly depraved behaviour, much of it necrophiliac in nature. And that's all I will say, aside from the fact that McCarthy's prose makes even the most revolting situations worth reading.

Anthony Bourdain, Medium Raw: A Bloody Valentine to the World of Food and the People Who Cook.

I quite simply have to love Anthony Bourdain. His schtick as the bad boy of the food world and the iconoclast of the Food Network would be entertaining but ultimately boring if undertaken by anyone else. Many of his targets are pretty easy, especially food "personalities" like Rachael Ray. Back when he published Kitchen Confidential in 2000—the book that made his reputation and his subsequent career—he took equal aim at all celebrity chefs, especially the likes of Bobby Flay and Emeril Lagasse. Now, ten years later, he is far more seasoned and thoughtful, and quite willing to admit error. This last quality is what most endears me to Bourdain: it's easy to be an iconoclast, but pretty damn hard to be a thoughtful one willing to revise one's opinions. And revise he has: he bemoans the increasing slide into populism made by the Food Network, while acknowledging that of course the network will go where the money is; he continues to mock Emeril et al, but gently, and acknowledges the fact that they are and always were superior chefs to him; and on that note, he is quite frank about his own pedestrian talents in the kitchen—he is (or was) a journeyman cook, and offers heartfelt advice to those just starting out about how to avoid his own missteps; all the while still being utterly unforgiving to those he sees as villains of the food world, from the leaders of the "slow food" movement to manufacturers of ground beef. Whatever else you think of him, Bourdain is always an entertaining read.

The reality virus, ctd: warriors and catches, deadly or otherwise

2010-07-30T13:20:00.002-02:30

OK, here's a telling glimpse into the working of my mind, and further evidence if you like for a mild case of attention deficit disorder ... or at least my fairly spectacular talent for tangents. You see, today's post is the one I had in mind when I sat down and wrote what became my rather long reality TV post of a few weeks ago (technically, two and a half months ago ... but who's counting?). The opening preamble there was meant as a lead-in to the observation of how reality television has sort of split itself into three or four sub-categories, and I was going to talk about one specific one. Except that then I didn't, and ended up talking about reality TV more generally.

That being said, I was pretty pleased with the way the post turned out, and now have some decent raw material should I pursue it as an article. Sometimes distractions can be fruitful ...

ANYWAY ... what initially prompted my televisual musings was that the previous Sunday evening I had been treated to several episodes in a row of my new guilty pleasure, Deadliest Warrior—a show that posits hypothetical battles between soldiers and warriors from different historical periods and places. Drawing on contemporary combat experts, medical science and computer simulations, the weapons and techniques of a given warrior are variously tested on dummies made of bones and ballistic gel, pig carcasses, and other, rather gruesome hybrids, and the results plugged into a computer. While parts often feel contrived, the show is like crack to military history geeks like myself. I have so far watched showdowns between a Maori warrior and Shaolin monk, Viking berserker and samurai, ninja and Spartan hoplite, Commanche and Mongol, and Alexander the Great and Attila the Hun.

Afterward, I reflected that the explosion of specialty cable stations catering to niche audiences has really facilitated the growth and spread of reality TV, though generally speaking a different species than you find on the major networks. The networks are generally attracted to the Survivor / American Idol form I discussed in my previous post on this subject, i.e. the competitive elimination show. Specialty cable tends to be all over the place, to the point where what has become known as "reality TV" shades into what I think we still term human interest—cooking shows, design shows, mini-documentaries, and the like. One only has to look at the Food Network however (as I do, frequently) to see the influence reality TV has exerted. When I started watching the Food Network some ten years ago, when it was in its infancy, it was principally cooking shows hosted by well-established chefs, with a handful of endearingly gimmicky shows tossed in for good measure (I really wish they'd rerun Two Fat Ladies). While some actual chefs remain, more often than not the shows have moved from straightforward this-is-how-to-cook shows to shows with a novelty basis or a competitive edge. Perennial Food TV favourite Bobby Flay is exemplary in this regard: one can chart the trajectory of his original show Grilling and Chilling, a straightforward cooking demonstration, to the most recent Throwdown, in which he travels around challenging chefs to a contest in cooking their signature dishes. Throw into the mix Top Chef, The Next Food Network Star, Iron Chef America, Chopped, The Ultimate Food TV Challenge, among others, and you have an impressive array of competition/elimination shows.

All this, incidentally, is not to complain. I'm still an avid Food Network viewer, and certainly will be as long as Alton Brown has a home there. This is just an observation of reality TV's rather invidious influence.

To return however to Deadliest Warrior ... watching that show, I had two big thoughts: (1) I lose interest rather quickly once the warriors involved employed firearms (such as in the Jesse James vs. Al Capone episode, or the Waffen SS vs. Viet Cong), and I wonder if I am not alone in this regard. Perhaps gunpowder is too contemporary for the military history geek in me; or perhaps the necessary distance between warriors that guns introduces makes the exercise less interesting. After all, and this was thought (2): the grim skill set required for the hand-to-hand combat that was the standard for the vast majority of human military history makes the differences in weaponry at points in the past more acute.

I must admit that there is something fascinating about the up close and personal warfare that predated modernity, and that's not merely my own vaguely creepy predilection—I'd argue that a great deal of the appeal of fantasy fiction derives from the appeal of sword-and-armour warfare. However, the more I've watched Deadliest Warrior, the more I've thought that it is of a piece with a significant sub-genre of the kind of reality TV one sees (most frequently) on the Discovery Network.

There have been a relatively small but still noteworthy number of series that feature a particular brand of working-class jobs. What kind of brand? The über-masculine, of course. The most popular of these is Deadliest Catch, which is now in its sixth season. For the uninitiated, Deadliest Catch follows a group of boats fishing for crab off Alaska. There is a limited window each season for Alaskan King Crab, and it happens to be during some of the worst winter weather, which is a recipe for crews working up to thirty-six hours at a go in freezing, dangerous conditions. A frequent theme deals with which people (that is to say: men) have the strength and stamina to do the job, versus those who do not. Just for good measure, many of the boats have a little father-son drama thrown in as well, usually with the boat's owner agonizing over whether his son "has what it takes" to take over the family business, or whether it should be bequeathed to the loyal first mate who has showed his chops over many years of service.

Deadliest Catch is however just the most popular example. There is also American Loggers, all about the manly profession of treecutting; Salvage Code Red, which follows the dangerous lives of people who salvage ships on the brink of sinking or being broken up in a storm; Oil, Sweat, & Rigs, whose description reads in part "Oil riggers work at the limits of human endurance, in difficult and sometimes terrifying conditions"; Black Gold, another oil-rig based show; and the one with my favourite title, Ice Road Truckers, whose tagline is "Take an adrenaline-pumping ride on one of the most dangerous roads in the world."

To be sure, these shows comprise a tiny fraction of the reality television on offer, but there are enough of them to now constitute their own sub-genre. And they are striking enough in their representations of a particular form of masculinity to raise the question of just what kind of lack they symbolically address?

The machismo on display in these shows is a specifically working-class version: the manly men populating these shows are not pretty or attractive, and care nothing for that; they are more often than not family men, away from their wives and children for the express purpose of supporting those wives and children; they are defined by their work, which is itself defined as the intersection of extreme physicality and extreme competence; and while they are not "elite" in the common sense the word is used lately (i.e. brainy Ivy League Easterners), they are elite in their unapologetic meritocracy, in which you are only as good as your ability to get the job done.

Now, I should add the caveat that (a) I don't mean to suggest that these jobs are mere artifice—whatever the sensationalism created by making them the subject of reality TV shows, the abilities and skills on display are real, and (b) I could never do any of these jobs (being "elite" in the milquetoast sense). Nevertheless, the shows exhibit a romantic and idealized conception of working-class labour and blue-collar ethic in a culture that has almost entirely devalued working-class existence. There was a time when there was a certain respect accorded the lunch-pail labourer (however much that respect was itself illusory), and the blue-collar individual had a place as a common character in popular culture. While that may be the case these days for the occasional sitcom (King of Queens, for example, or Roseanne), what working-class figures make it onto the small screen usually embody something more than a nine-to-five, simple and honest paycheque ethic—cops, for example, or firefighters (Rescue Me, Third Watch), whose jobs are who the characters are. When a character's career fades into a series' background noise, it is usually something white collar or vaguely office-related and well-paying.

I can't figure out if these manly-job shows simply express nostalgia for straightforward, "honest" work, or reflect a deeper anxiety. They do seem to be of a piece with the various crises of masculinity that infected the 1990s—presumably, Tyler Durden would approve of any man making a living on a crab boat or ice road truck. But they are also symptomatic, I would argue, of a uniquely American schizophrenia for which Sarah Palin is the most extreme example: that is, a valorization of "ordinary," "real," or "authentic" America, typically defined in contradistinction to "liberal," "elite" America (which is presumably inhabited by snobs with Ivy League educations sipping their lattes while scheming about how to tax "real" America). That this figuration is nativist and deeply anti-intellectual is obvious, and nothing new. But it also manages to celebrate this illusion of ordinary Americans at the very same time as it expresses contempt for anyone earning less than six figures. Just four posts ago, I commented on Ben Stein's dismissal of those thrown out of work by the current recession as "people with poor work habits and poor personalities"—whereas in reality, it is the "ordinary" Americans whose corner Sarah Palin and the Tea Party are ostensibly who suffer most in the current economic climate, and who potentially benefit the most from letting the Bush tax cuts on the wealthy expire.

I don't mean to suggest that Deadliest Catch is therefore a pernicious expression of American conservatism, but rather that it is symptomatic of a flawed attempt to imagine a sort of "authentic" American masculinity. Which doesn't mean I won't watch it when it's on. Or Deadliest Warrior, for that matter.