Archive for 2008
#Gun, With Occasional Music
In Gun, With Occasional Music, Jonathan Lethem gives us science fiction’s worthy successor to Raymond Chandler. Though this is the easy take-home message from nearly every quoted newspaper columnist, book jacket blurb, and miscellaneous reviewer — they also all happen to be right. Even a cursory familiarity with Chandler’s pulp noir will ring through with startling clarity to readers of this novel. The cadence of the narrative, the hard-boiled dialogue, the archetypal characters… Lethem’s Conrad Metcalf is a well-executed Philip Marlowe cover song with just a little bit of record scratching thrown into the background for texture.
On the other hand, those same columnist quotes, blurbs, and reviewers all seem to liken Lethem to Philip K. Dick. Personally: not seeing it. It’s a bit of a stretch, some optimistic name-dropping to match up Lethem’s mystery/noir heritage with some similarly classic science fiction antecedent. The ubiquitous drug use? Sure, okay — that’s a bit Dickian. A Möbius fold of reality unraveling around the narrator in some palpable and thoroughly eldritch fashion? Not so much. More than PKD, the scenes in this novel played out in my imagination as fearfully symmetrical to Cronenberg’s take on Burroughs‘ Naked Lunch — substitute Jim Henson-esque “evolved” animals for Mugwumps but otherwise that’s it, right down to Peter Weller as Conrad Metcalf.
Or maybe Punk’s review has got it down:
It’s Blade Runner meets Who Framed Roger Rabbit?
Where was I? Oh right…
A part of me desires to do a chapter-by-chapter deconstruction of the text, to get all scholarly about it and run the blockade of Chandler’s lineage here. I want to look for the hidden significance of the doctors as urologists, to get semiotic on names like “Catherine Teleprompter” and “Danny Phoneblum”. But instead I’ll just give a positive nod. It’s a fun, noirish scifi romp with all the right moves and delivers slightly better than expectations.
★★★★☆
A version of this review originally appeared on GoodReads.com.
#X-Files: Season Three
After the thrilling, cliffhanger ending to Season Two, A. and I were more than ready to get to the next developments in the series. Too bad we had a “Very Long Wait” ahead of us in the rental queue1. It was worth the wait though. The writers for Season Three have found their stride and the actors are thoroughly in character, delivering strong performances all around. If there was a central theme in Season Two2, I am not finding the same centralized scaffolding for Season Three. That said, for as bleak and dark as Season Two got, Season Three seems to respond with a reprieve — an equal mix of “serious” episodes balanced by vaguely self-parodic episodes. Read the rest of this entry »
#links for 2008-07-19
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via B^2 :: read for the Dyson short
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via The Guardian (via /.)
#links for 2008-07-18
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via B^2
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via John Joseph Adams (via Ecstatic Days)
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via Seven Days
#links for 2008-07-17
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via Signal vs. Noise (by 37signals) (via DF)
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via the simple dollar
#dream.20080716: falls
We spend far too long at the store. Between the research and the trying out different items and then finally filling in all the paperwork for the service agreements and all of that. Since when did A. become obsessed with HDMI? And why? She has even gone so far as to say that this whole purchase is to improve the music at the house. I suppose that could be the case… But then why the large flat-panel television? She mentions the musical news like in Lethem’s Gun, With Occasional Music but I’m not buying it. Someone has gotten to her. And as soon as we leave the store with this cart full of electronic apparatuses, the curb gives way to a waterfall. The water seems to start just under the box store and runs down, falling at least a hundred feet. Something suspicious down there. The cart is gone and A. and I are strapping ourselves into climbing harnesses handed over from unseen hands. We need to climb down and inspect the caves behind the falls. It will be a delicate and difficult climb down. Flashes of memory, of some crime committed; a series of ambiguous and increasingly bizarre crimes. We slip over the side and begin down.
#dream.20080715: survivalism
I suppose it’s played like a game though the urgency suggests that the threats are real. But how can a half-dozen people locked in a 15′×30′ room really qualify as a civilization? No matter. When we detect the interlopers down the hall, we get the door slammed and barred before they can see us. But they know that we’re in here and they’ll try anything to get in. Just as we are prepared to make any sacrifice to keep them out. We grab rocks, bricks, blocks of wood — any kind of shim we can find in the closet and jam them under the door, anything to seal it up. Out in the hall we can hear them trying to work their way in. They’re trying to lower the floor. We hover near the door, holding our bodies up against it like that will make some difference. The room is filling with water? The water rises. We dive down to ensure that the shims are still lodged under the door crack. A hand comes through from the other side, we grab it and go at it with a bow saw. Cries of pain, the arm recoils. The water recedes some but there is damage and one of us has drowned. We wait for cries or even shuffling from the other side but it seems they have retreated. We are loathe to re-open the door.
#links for 2008-07-11
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via EFF (via /.) :: makes you wonder if maybe now isn’t a good time to consider open revolt? or maybe just make the signal-to-noise so bad that wiretapping does no good?
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Publish • Sell • Buy
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via mefogus :: awesome, I’ve been looking for something like this
