→ March 10, 2008
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The Pickwick Papers.

My wife has long told me that I am afraid of long books. I think she’s right. Since college, I’ve only read a few books that were as long as 600 pages (not counting Harry Potter books – I’m just talking literature here), and I’ve been pretty selective about starting any book of more than around 400 pages. This does limit one’s options, especially in the realm of serious literature.

The flip side, however, is that I get great satisfaction from actually reading a book of that length. I’ve built reading long books up so much in my mind that completing one – especially doing so in a relatively short length of time – feels like a great achievement. As a result, I was very pleased to find Charles Dickens’ The Pickwick Papers to be a great read, and, with some help from a too-long travel day and a stomach virus, managed to knock it off in just two weeks.

The Pickwick Papers (#76 on the The Novel 100) was Dickens’ first novel and is unique in his canon as both a comedy and a picaresque novel, making it much more readable than that scourge of all of our high school years, Great Expectations. Pickwick follows the four members of the “Pickwick Club,” a sort of traveling social group of four men, led by the elder Samuel Pickwick, and his three followers. Like most picaresque novels, the book is structured around a series of stories, and was in fact sold in monthly installments as it was written, but the stories last longer and are more interconnected in Pickwick than in other classics of the genre, like The Adventures of Roderick Random. The central storyline, emblematic of Dickens’ later subject matter, is a lawsuit, allowing Dickens to satirize the justice system, crooked lawyers, and greedy people, but threaded through it are the romantic follies of his followers and his loyal servant, Samuel Weller, as well as the Pickwick Club’s run-ins with the fraudster Alfred Jingle.

The novel is a masterpiece of plot construction and comic invention. Dickens weaves the subplots together and deftly paces the stories to keep them fresh in the reader’s mind without revealing too much of any one subplot at once. Although the story relies heavily on coincidences – mostly characters running into each other – it was a common plot device of the time. And the wit in his prose is tremendous, from Dickens’ descriptions of some of his fringe characters (“his forehead was narrow, his face wide, his head large, and his nose all on one side, as if Nature, indignant with the propensities she observed in him in his birth, had given it an angry tweak which it had never recovered”) to satires large and small on all manner of persons.

If you’re up for the 840-page read, I recommend the 2004 Signet Classics edition (linked above) because of the presence of a short afterword by Jasper Fforde, who sings the novel’s praises and also mentions the fate of some of the landmark buildings mentioned in the book, a few of which survive to this day. And if you’re not up for it, I suggest that you hop over to Project Gutenberg, download the free e-text, and read Chapter 49. It’s a self-contained story that is just brilliantly delivered, and a good taste of what the best parts of The Pickwick Papers have to offer.

Next up: Darkness at Noon, by Arthur Koestler.

Filed Under: Literature Tagged With: , , , ,
→ March 9, 2008
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Alive…

Just a quick note that I am still alive, out in Arizona now and recovering from a wicked stomach virus that hit my daughter and then me. If any of you should find yourselves in Phoenix and in need of urgent medical care for your child, I can recommend Phoenix Children’s Hospital. I’m hoping to have a regular post up later today.

Also, there have been some questions regarding how comments work here. If you’ve had an approved comment here before, then your future comments are posted without moderation, although I do see them as they come in. The exception is comments with links – any comment with external links in it is held for moderation, so on Thursday, when I was traveling all day, a few comments were held for over 24 hours while I was offline. I also use a spam filter on comments and for whatever reason, it takes a dislike to certain users, so if you’ve posted legitimate comments and haven’t seen them on the site, that may be the reason why. Just keep trying.

Thanks…

Filed Under: Uncategorized
→ March 5, 2008
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Howl’s Moving Castle.

I’m a big fan of the movies of film director Hayao Miyazaki, but just got around to seeing his last release, Howl’s Moving Castle. After the triumph of his previous film, Spirited Away, it was a disappointment, although it’s still a strong film when compared to the rest of the field – animated or otherwise.

Sophie is a 19-year-old girl working in her family’s hat shop, but after an odd encounter with a handsome young wizard in the streets of her town, she’s visited by the Witch of the Waste (voiced by Lauren Bacall), who casts a spell that turns her into an elderly woman. She sets out in search of the wizard Howl and his “moving castle,” a building that walks on mechanical legs, powered by the fire demon Calcifer (Billy Crystal). Her hope is that Howl can reverse the aging spell cast on her, but it turns out that Howl and Calcifer both have spell problems of their own.

Howl’s moves along well until its final quarter, at which point the plot becomes needlessly complex and ends up in a horribly clichéd and quick resolution. It’s a shame, because the first three-fourths of the movie is strong and the writers were unafraid to deviate from the normal paths of animated films. (The movie was adapted from a young-adult novel by Diana Wynne Jones.) Howl’s starts out as an action film, then settles into a more deliberate pace to try to explore the psychological drama behind the characters’ various curses, but never fulfills that promise before returning to action-film pacing and rushing to the finish.

As with all Miyazaki films, Howl’s has more than its share of arresting imagery and sheer inventiveness. The design of the moving castle is phenomenal, and it threatens in some ways to become a character in its own right (and perhaps it should have). The landscape scenes are gorgeous and rich, with layers and textures that are more associated with CG on these shores. The folks at Pixar who oversaw the English dubbing made a pair of inspired choices of voice actors in Crystal, who does a sort of poor man’s Robin Williams/Genie with Calcifer, and Lauren Bacall, whose voice is perfect for the evil witch who turns out to be something a bit deeper than that.

If you’re not already a Miyazaki fan, the place to start is with his masterwork, Spirited Away, probably the best non-CG animated movie ever made. I also highly recommend My Neighbor Totoro, which is a little more of a children’s story than most Miyazaki films but makes the application of the word “charming” to any other film seem fraudulent. I also recommend Castle in the Sky and Princess Mononoke, as well as Whisper of the Heart, a romantic film for which Miyazaki wrote the screenplay but which was directed by a colleague of his, Yoshifumi Kondo, who died just three years after its release.

Filed Under: DVDs Tagged With: , ,
→ March 4, 2008
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Gary Gygax dies at 69.

AP story on Gygax’ death

How many times will we see this referenced in sports columnist rants against statistical analysis over the next week?

Filed Under: Media, Sports Tagged With:
→ March 4, 2008
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Peak Oil.

With oil prices seeming to settle in around $100 a barrel – an alarming number, but not all that surprising when you consider the dollar’s weakness – perhaps it’s time for some contrarian thinking on the arrival of the so-called “Peak Oil” state.

“The World Has Plenty of Oil.” Mr. Saleri’s conclusion:

Sufficient liquid crude supplies do exist to sustain production rates at or near 100 million barrels per day almost to the end of this century.

His strongest point, beyond the straight recitation of statistics on what we know is in the ground and how much we actually consume, is that high oil prices will tend to create incentives for alternatives, both alternative fuel/energy sources, but also alternative extraction techniques. Oil that was not profitable to extract at $50 a barrel may be quite profitable at $100 barrel, and if oil prices remain high, previously untapped sources of oil will come on line. (A 2005 study by the RAND corporation said that a “surface retorting complex” for extracting oil from shale “is unlikely to be profitable unless real crude oil
prices are at least $70 to $95 per barrel (2005 dollars).”)

All in all it’s a rather different message than what you might read in your daily fishwrap or what you’ll hear from any environmental group. Oil will run out eventually, but it’s not likely to happen in our lifetimes.

Filed Under: Economics Tagged With:
→ March 3, 2008
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ESPNEWS today.

I’ll be on ESPNEWS at 4:20 pm EST today.

Filed Under: Appearances
→ February 29, 2008
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Song of Solomon.

Toni Morrison’s Beloved is one of my favorite novels of any time period or genre, and since Song of Solomon is considered her second-best work, it’s been on my to-be-read list for a long time. It’s not quite the masterwork that Beloved is, but it’s still a great literary achievement of phenomenal scope, another example of how Morrison can take universal themes and express them through individual characters and simple stories.

Song of Solomon is the story of the Dead family, a black family separated by disagreement, by location, and by financial situation into two branches. The book’s central character, Macon “Milkman” Dead, is born in the opening pages, and the central plot strand follows his lifelong search for identity, although it’s not until the book’s final third that he realizes himself that that’s what he’s seeking. Along the way, he breaks with his father and forges a relationship with his paternal aunt, then reunites with his father and sets off on an ill-fated mission that harkens back to the origins of the family split. The novel uses this quest by the grandson of a freed slave to explore questions of racial identity, the double oppression faced by black women, and the uplifting and destructive powers of love.

The book is rife with references to the Bible and Greek mythology, including the unusual character names that are par for the course with Morrison, all bringing us insight into the characters themselves. Milkman has a sister named First Corinthians, named by her father by the random selection of a Bible verse, but named by Morrison to signify the woman’s role as someone who attempts to bring people together. (The apostle Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians was occasioned by reports of possible schisms in the fledgling Christian church in Corinth.) Morrison also works in allusions to other stories and novels, some obvious, such as the way the character Circe serves a similar purpose to her Greek namesake, and some more debatable, such as the resemblance of Hagar, named after Abraham’s servant and concubine, to Nately’s whore from Catch-22. The heavy yet seamless use of allusions and references make reading a good Morrison novel into a textural experience.

Next up: The Pickwick Papers, by my high school nemesis, Chuckie Dickie. I’ve got 600 pages to go, so it might be a while before my next book writeup.

Filed Under: Literature Tagged With: , , , ,
→ February 29, 2008
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Robert Irvine Redux.

Brian Montgomery of the St. Petersburg Times dropped me a note this morning to point me to the most recent twist in the Robert Irvine saga. They’ve got statements from FN and Irvine on their site; the gist is that Irvine’s contract won’t be renewed after the current season, although Dinner: Impossible will (probably?) continue with a new host.

Filed Under: Food, Media Tagged With: ,
→ February 28, 2008
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Keith Law, a Captain among Rabbits.

So I have a Google Alert set up with my name so I can catch when I’m quoted by sportswriters or various blogs. Of course, there’s some noise in there, with occasional crime stories popping up (the hazard of having my last name) and, well, things like this:

But Geoff’s master stroke has been to appoint Keith Law as his Rabbit Captain. … Certainly, Keith is the man for this Mission Impossible and it will crown what looks like being another fabulous year’s golf at Hebden Bridge Golf Club if he can pull it off. Watch this space.

I have no idea what any of that means, but I might use “Rabbit Captain” as my title on my next set of business cards.

Filed Under: Humor, Media
→ February 26, 2008
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Eastern Promises and The Bourne Ultimatum.

Continuing with our recent theme of praising understatement in television/cinema, Eastern Promises delivers a similarly un-Hollywood thriller filled with complex characters and a small number of pivotal plot twists, with plenty of ambiguity to keep the viewer thinking, although a slightly coincidence-driven denouement did detract somewhat from the brilliance of the preceding 80 minutes.

Eastern Promises stars Viggo Mortensen as Nikolai, the tough, stoic, possibly psychotic driver for a Russian organized crime family in London. A teenaged girl connected to that family ends up dying while giving birth in a hospital with midwife Anna (Naomi Watts), who is of Russian descent, attending. But what appears to be – and was marketed as – a straight-up thriller where Anna ends up chased by the mob because of what she knows about the dead girl turns instead into a series of interconnected threads around shifting loyalties within the crime family. Nikolai and Anna are well-drawn, complex characters, revealed in layers as the film goes on, as is Kirill, Nikolai’s boss and the son of the crime family’s patriarch. Even into the final scenes, we’re still learning about these characters.

Mortensen was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actor for his performance, which was superb and utterly convincing, although I didn’t really see how any of us benefited from seeing him naked during the film’s major (and ultra-tense) fight scene. Watts was also superb in her role, and I was impressed by the filmmakers’ decision to dress her down for the entire film – her hair and especially her makeup were appropriate to the role, and while Watts is unspeakably pretty even without makeup, she was credible for the way she was presented.

The film’s ending, however, hinges on a misjudgment and a coincidence to lead to the climactic scene, which I can only imagine the scriptwriter envisioned first and had to work backwards to lead the characters to that place and situation. The misjudgment revolves around the unstated assumption that the hospital would not have a vial or two of the baby’s blood around, which strikes me as unlikely. The coincidence, the one sloppy bit of scriptwriting in the entire movie, revolves around Anna leaving the hospital just as Kirill arrives. A few seconds either way and the final scene never happens. The improbability of it all cracks the veneer of belief the film creates to that point, although the resolution itself is strong enough to complete the storyline and provide sufficient cover for the film’s few, minor lapses.

—

The Bourne Ultimatum is anything but understated. It’s an American-style – or perhaps just a Hollywood-style – thriller with unambiguously drawn characters, clear good guy/bad guy delineation, and enough action to make you momentarily forget the empty-calorie plot.

The first film in the series, The Bourne Identity, had surprising meat on it because of the title character’s identity crisis: He doesn’t remember who he is and doesn’t know his capabilities, then as he learns how skilled he is, he doesn’t know how he became that way. By now, we’re fully aware of who Jason Bourne is and what he can do, so there’s no more surprise when he busts out a new foreign language or escapes from an impossible situation. There’s some cleverness to the setups in The Bourne Ultimatum, and I won’t deny that it was exciting, but it’s not a good movie so much as a good movie for its genre.

Incidentally, Matt Damon reversed course and has now signed on to appear in a fourth installment of the series, which will give Julia Stiles a chance to stand around and look pretty some more, a task for which she seems rather well qualified.

Filed Under: DVDs Tagged With: , , , ,