Reviews – Page 3 – Salt Sweet Bitter

A Note on Heathcliff and Wuthering Heights

I discovered Cassandra Clare’s The Infernal Devices trilogy last year and fell head over heels for the steampunk London she created and the characters inhabiting it, so much so that I barely cared about the anachronisms and inconsistencies in details of the story that are supposed to be realistic–something that usually strikes me like nails on the proverbial chalkboard.

One detail of the story really did bother me, though, and it isn’t something Clare alone is guilty of. When the heroine, Tessa, is falling for the boy of her decidedly literary dreams, she envisions him more than once as Heathcliff, from Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights.

When and how did Heathcliff get turned into a figure of romance and desire?

Wuthering Heights is a phenomenal novel, one of my personal favourites and one of the greats of English literature. If you haven’t read it, do, it’s amazing. The thing is, it’s not a romantic, bittersweet love story. It’s a story about a boy who is tormented by his adopted family who grows up into a violent, bitter sociopath. Heathcliff is not a nice man, and he is not written that way. I am endlessly confused as to where this idea that he belongs among the ranks of Mr. Darcy and Pip from Great Expectations came from; why it persists is less of a mystery, but it’s still frustrating.

It must have happened before the 1970s, for Heath Ledger’s parents to name him and his sister after Heathcliff and Cathy. Was the soppy 1939 film version responsible? Are people reading the Cliffs Notes version and skipping the actual book? I would love to start a conversation about this, because it isn’t the sort of thing one can find an answer to in any volume of criticism on Emily Bronte, and unless I know where to read for the answers I want I’ll be trailing around in the dark for who knows how long. If you have any insights, please please please feel free to leave a comment.

(P.S. if you’re looking for a more faithful adaptation of the story, the 1992 version with Ralph Fiennes and Juliet Binoche and the 2011 version by Andrea Arnold are both excellent, although Arnold’s only covers part of the story. I love Tom Hardy and all, but the 2009 version was a disappointment–particularly because he would have made a brilliant Heathcliff if the script had been better. )

Friday Fave: Christine and the Queens

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Pop music that isn’t sung in English rarely gets much of a listen among U.S. audiences. once in a while a song, usually associated with an insanely popular film, that includes a verse–or a phrase or two–in a second language will be really popular, but for the most part it’s English all the way. I wonder at times if French pop is met with particularly studied rejection after the brief rage for Jordy’s “Dur Dur D’Etre Bebe” back in 1992 (apologies to all who had successfully blocked that memory. I think I remember buying the single when it came out, but mostly I remember a few instances of singing the lyrics along with a few classmates to torture our French teacher, who was remarkably patient and good-natured but hated the song. It does grate on the nerves after about 10 seconds.)

Dur Dur D’Etre Bebe (and the somewhat alarming image of family life portrayed in its video) aside, the general distaste for foreign pop and rock music is a pity on many scores. I’ve always found it particularly odd when a singer or a group makes the charts in several other countries, or all over the world, and remains virtually unknown in the U.S. As with so many things–particularly football/soccer–this feels like a sort of willful denial on our part, and a bit immature. As though we are covering our ears, scrunching up our faces and muttering “unh-uh” while a the rest of the world holds out a glass of good champagne and a plate of chocolate truffles to us, insisting that we’ll like it if we only give it a chance.

I stopped paying attention to music television and radio when I was finishing high school, save for a brief spell in 2001 when my otherwise tight-fisted landlord gave us free cable television for six months (so he could hike the rent on the next tenants) and there were a couple of music stations that still played music videos. Since then, I’ve relied on reviews, word of mouth, and television shows to hear new stuff. The Daily Show and Stephen Colbert have proved particularly useful in this regard–they don’t have musical guests on all that often, but those they do have are usually acts I find worth listening to. Or, in case of The National, find myself a week later trying to buy up their complete back catalogue.

The only other act from TDS I’ve really fallen for is Christine and the Queens, otherwise known as Héloïse Letissier offstage. She was one of Trevor Noah’s first few musical guests, if not the first, and I think I enjoyed Noah’s complete loss for words at how to respond to her performance as I did the music itself. She and her dancers/band are one of the few rock/pop acts that make live music an actual performance, not by adding a lightshow and other special effects, but by making dance and a number of cultural references an integral part of the show along with the singing. She also uses every song she sings to question and break down gender and sexual normativity, which a lot of people still find threatening; as I watched Trevor Noah’s brief interview with her, I wondered if he had bothered to listen to any of her music before the show.

I didn’t rush to iTunes for the album immediately, but when I did get to it a few weeks later I wished I had. I played it pretty much non-stop for a month, and it was one of the things that got me through last December without losing my mind. She has a lovely voice, and does 80s-style synth-pop better than they did in the 80s. (Granted, she probably has better equipment than was available 25-30 years ago.) She does sing in French, but she re-recorded the album for international release with some of the lyrics translated into English. It sounds like an odd proposition, and I’m sure in some cases it would produced questionable results, but she makes it work beautifully.

She seems to be making waves everywhere but here, which is a pity; we’re missing out. Of course the language barrier isn’t the only obstacle to her popularity over here–we may be making strides in terms of breaking down prejudice against the cishet status quo, but there’s a ways to go yet. Letissier just isn’t interested in waiting, or diluting her style to make it more palatable for the general population: she does what makes her happy. I’m sure it would make a great many more people here happy too, if they had a listen.

Friday Fave: Halt and Catch Fire

When Halt and Catch Fire started three years ago, my sole reason for watching it was Lee Pace, who is all kinds of awesome and I couldn’t understand why his shows kept getting cancelled. (If you haven’t seen Wonderfalls or Pushing Daisies, go hunt them up on Netflix or YouTube or wherever, stat. You have been missing out for years. Also, boo, Fox and ABC respectively, boo.) I was mildly interested that it was filmed in Atlanta, but mostly it was to watch Lee Pace. Beyond that, I didn’t know what to expect–I think I had an idea that it would be a bit like Mad Men, but set in Silicon Valley. Not knocking Mad Men, which was great, but I was getting a bit bored with the white-male-mid-life crisis angst and tragedy. It has been the primary focus of quite a bit of truly brilliant television in recent years–Breaking Bad being another example–and said television has featured some women and even (rarely) central characters who aren’t white, but brilliant television always inspired dozens of not-as-great imitations, usually with less imagination and even less effort at representation.

Mad Men this is not. Corporate culture certainly has a presence in the story, but this time it holds no allure or glamour; it is a world that is stifling, threatening, something that three of the four, if not all, of the main characters are fighting to overthrow, not to conquer. They are not a part of of it and they have no wish to be. Neither is this a male-dominated show, which has been glossed over or gotten lost in some of the advertising. It is about two men, two women, and the rise of the home computer industry. The acting is excellent.

Underneath that, of course, it is about so much more. It is about two couples: one pair who constantly have to negotiate their way between a desire for the stereotypical suburban home and 2.5 children and making the most of their considerable talent for engineering and mathematics, and the other whose relationship is pretty much just a hot mess. It is about two women who decide that they don’t want to be relegated to support roles in the lives of the men they work for and live with, and how they struggle with suddenly being seen as a threat by those same men, consciously and otherwise. It is a close comparison of the intersections between work and home life change when you have a family and all that that entails.

It isn’t a perfect television series–some episodes are better than others, and some of the subplots are at times more compelling than the central story. It could do better in terms of representation, although it’s doing better than some shows in this regard. I’m also finding that the effort to cover all the major leaps in the evolution of the computing world are feeling a bit strained. I know just enough about coding and hacking to have found that aspect of The Honourable Woman a constant irritation in watching the last few episodes of show, but not enough to be distracted by any errors present in this one. What does bother me is that, in the world of the story, these four people seem to responsible for most, if not all of the major innovations that we now take for granted–the initial Apple vs. Microsoft fight was substantial enough, but some six years later they’ve also created the seeds of e-bay, online multi-player games, and it looks like someone might be about to invent a thinly-disguised Sirius radio. With the sheer number of people who were and are drawn to this industry–something that is reflected in the show, whenever a scene takes place in public or business setting–it feels disingenuous to present this quartet of characters as the only really imaginative innovators in the field, and placing so much of the burden of that innovation on those four characters takes away from the parts of the story that make the show compelling.

The thing I love best about the show is that it has two fully developed female leads who work and live in what is still a male-dominated industry, but beyond that I love that the writers decided to maintain their focus on these four characters, and the development of the story constantly realigns their alliances and allegiances enough to keep their interactions interesting but not so much that all four come off as sociopaths who have no real grasp of what fidelity is. (Joe is a sociopath, but he’s written that way; the other three are sane, if damaged to varying degrees.) I also really like that the show’s title is an integral metaphor for the shared tendency of the characters to self-sabotage their emotional and professional relationships; titles are important when it comes to stories, but televisions shows are usually just named for their character or a setting. It’s unusual to have such an apt title continue to reflect an important aspect of the story, and I think a lot of the reviewers who dismissed the show in its first two seasons didn’t make that connection–I’ve only ever seen it mentioned in order to explain the term’s meaning as a coding command.

I don’t tend to read a lot of reviews for any one show, and the few I’ve read over the past three years for this one have always made me feel like the decision to renew it must be balanced on a knife-edge; it has always been highly rated by calculators such as Rotten Tomatoes, but it seemed to suffer from a lack of interest rather than negative opinion. Renewals for the second and third season were thus pleasant surprises. (Most of those reviews I have read have complained about the show’s lack of substance, to the point that I wonder if they actually watched the thing. It has substance in plenty; it is just that you can only take the drama of literally creating code and machinery so far. After that the human elements of egotism and jealousy and fecklessness and just plain wanting something from another person have to take over, otherwise you have no story.)

Season three seems to be attracting more attention, and more positive reviews, than the first two, so I’m finally allowing myself to hope for season four. Season three is currently airing Tuesday nights on AMC in the U.S.; in the UK it is available on Amazon Prime.

Friday Fave: Kate McKinnon

I wasn’t originally planning on seeing the new Ghostbusters, but when a friend wanted to get together one afternoon this was the only thing that appealed to both of us–everything else was too political or too heavy, and the films I really wanted to see weren’t out at the time. I was definitely looking forward to seeing something that pissed off Milo Yiannopoulos so badly; that alone made it worth it to me. I had witnessed his campaign of racist and misogynist abuse of Leslie Jones on Twitter (if witnessed is the word? I was online at the time and following some of the threads, but I had decided several months before not to follow Yiannopoulos himself), as well as the general whining about remaking an action film with all female leads, which also made me want to see it. All that said, I have not found previous Melissa McCarthy films especially entertaining, and was not expecting this one to be either, even if it did have Kristin Wiig in it.

Rarely am I so happy to be wrong. Leslie Jones was awesome, as was–somewhat unexpectedly–Chris Hemsworth. I had already settled on him as definitely the most talented of the Hemsworth brothers by miles (possibly the only talented one, at that), going by what I had seen him in previously. The cameos by the original cast members were cleverly and seamlessly worked in. I was also pleased to find that they used the original Ray Parker Jr. recording of the theme tune throughout, in addition to the new and distinctly worse version.

My favourite part of the film, though, was Kate McKinnon. I haven’t liked a performance in a comedy film so much since Emma Stone in Easy A (which I only started watching because I didn’t know what it was–literary snob that I am, I had been studiously avoiding it). Aside from the occasional Stefan sketch or “commercial”, I hadn’t watched Saturday Night Live since Amy Poehler and Tina Fey left, so I only knew who she was by process of elimination. That scene where Holtzmann starts dancing to “The Rhythm of the Night”, though? I’ve never felt the slightest doubt about my identity as heterosexual woman, but that was hot. Throughout the film, she and Leslie Jones are the funniest things in it. I came home, pre-ordered the blu-ray, and started looking up old clips of SNL.

Turned out I had seen her in a couple of skits, but hadn’t noticed her because the skits as a whole are so funny. (If you didn’t see The Day Beyonce Turned Black when it came out, you can find it here, and it’s hilarious.) She has a well-earned reputation for impressions–her versions of Justin Bieber and CNN’s Kate Bolduan are brilliant. My favourite CNN skits are almost always the ones where the cast themselves can’t keep from cracking up, and she also seems to have a knack for giving her co-stars fits of the giggles, as she does in this skit about alien abductions. She also has a cat named Nino, and talks about him probably as much as I do about my animals, so I’m sold.

And she’s Holtzmann, who is all kinds of awesome. If you haven’t seen Ghostbusters, go check it out, it’s well worth it.

Friday Fave: Fumbling Towards Ecstasy

This is one of those albums for which I’ve started avoiding looking at the year it was released, because it makes me feel old. (It turns 22 this year. Probably gets played on those oldies stations that I also avoid listening to because a friend told me a few years ago that Blind Melon’s “No Rain” is officially an oldie now and how can that be &*%^$ possible?)

I discovered the single “Possession” on a flight from Atlanta to Miami when I was 15: It was on a list of maybe eight tracks the airline had compiled of rock and pop music on the in-flight “radio” station. I listened to that channel for the entire flight, sitting through the other entirely forgettable songs just to hear “Possession” maybe three times. I got the album as soon as it came out, and I have never stopped listening.

I still listen to a lot of the music I loved when I was a teenager, but most of it is still dear to me out of a sense of nostalgia: I am not the person I was when I fell in love with those songs, and in a lot of cases my taste has changed to the extent that some of it now sounds shallow and hackneyed–the lyrics capture a glimmer of how I felt at the time, but the songs aren’t strikingly inventive in any way. Fumbling towards Ecstasy is one of the exceptions. Every song on it is still as compelling to me as they were the day I brought the album home, particularly “Possession,” “Ice,” and the titular “Fumbling toward Ecstasy.”

While there’s plenty to be said about originality and inventiveness in popular music, a large part of what I’ve always valued in rock and other short-form songs is the use of lyrics–without the imagery and expression, the greater part of the artistry in rock stems from using existing melodies and rhythms in new ways. She captures something of Romanticism in its original literary sense, and a lot of the imagery she uses in her songs subverts and questions the representations of women ingrained in our culture, particularly those of Christian iconography. Most of the songs on her first four albums aren’t about love at all, and those that are are not about winning the guy but about struggling to keep one’s sense of personal identity from being subsumed by obsession, about questioning whether love and passion are the same thing, about whether overwhelming physical passion is ever a truly healthy thing.

A lot of television and film reviews these days discuss the idea of the male gaze, and how more and more directors are creating love scenes and other interactions on screen to present such exchanges from the woman’s perspective, and to appeal to the tastes of female viewers. This is something that McLachlan does in her music that few other musicians were doing at the time–she uses the female perspective in ways that weren’t often heard on popular radio stations back in 1994. Most pop love songs sung from the woman’s perspective even now are limited to celebrating a particular ideal man, questioning what a man wants from a woman, or occasionally rejecting that in favour of another man (or preferring being alone). Before Sarah McLachlan and her support of women artists via the Lilith Fair, there wasn’t a lot of pop music making it onto the charts that asked not just was this man or that man worth it, would he treat you well, but what do you really want in a lover and a partner? (Regardless of that partner’s gender.) She also cast the woman in a relationship in the role of the protector and the provider–and, in “Possession”, as the stalker. (Everyone always brings up “Every Breath You Take” as the quintessential example of a really creepy song being misunderstood as a glorious love song, but when you look at the lyrics of “Possession”, which were in fact inspired by things that two stalkers wrote to McLachlan in the early years of her career. It isn’t as airily romantic as her voice implies; the words are more evocative of paranoid delusion than they are of sane, if melodramatic, love.)

She wasn’t alone–there was Aimee Mann, the Indigo Girls, P. J. Harvey, Melissa Etheridge, Salt n’ Pepa, and a few others active at the same time–but she was a rarity, and she has used her fame to promote other women in music and music education in general. This album is still the best of McLachlan’s work and, together with its bookends Solace and Surfacing, still sounds vital and a little different from anything else around.

The Friday Fave: Hamilton!

As a few of my friends already know, I have Hamilaria. (I don’t randomly break into song, I promise. I do find the tunes popping up in my mind at inopportune moments.)

I was late to the party when it came to discovering Hamilton. I tend to resist anything that feels over-hyped, usually certain that it will turn out to be at best shallow and at worst–unintentionally or not–deeply offensive to one or more segments of society. Or just awful and inexplicably popular. (Still mystified why anyone bothered to read Fifty Shades of Grey. If you’re into pornographic novels, surely there are better-written examples lining the shelves of the Romance section–ones that don’t glorify manipulative, abusive, and controlling relationships. Surely.) Occasionally, however, I have come to regret this tendency. It was about four years into the show’s run before I watched Buffy the Vampire Slayer out of boredom, mostly because I remembered Sarah Michelle Gellar from Swan’s Crossing and All My Children and I was convinced she couldn’t possibly have become a good actor. (I was being a snob. This was stupid of me.) The same happened with the Harry Potter novels, which I regret a bit more, because the first editions of those first few novels must be worth quite a bit now.

When mentions of Hamilton suddenly started popping up on just about every media platform I read and watch, I didn’t pay much attention, because a) I haven’t really enjoyed many musicals written after the 1980s, and b) the idea of adapting the life of Alexander Hamilton and the American Revolution struck me as excessively odd. I thought the multi-racial cast was an awesome idea and was interested by the use rap in the music, but I just couldn’t get my head around the idea of writing a musical about the American Revolution. The outcome was a great thing, but living through it must have been a harrowing experience for most of those involved. It’s not a subject that lends itself to comedy, and the notions of comedy and musical theatre are inextricably linked in my mind. I really ought to have known better–Miss Saigon was my favourite musical prior to this, and it isn’t as though there’s anything saccharine about Rent or Gypsy.

Oh me of little faith. There are some moments of humor, to be sure–many provided by Jonathan Groff’s deliciously camp King George III–but Hamilton is decidedly a drama, not a comic opera. I finally decided to give it a listen when I heard Leslie Odom Jr. sang the part of Burr–I’d been waiting for his reappearance since Smash was cancelled. One afternoon when I finished work early I pulled up some of the songs on YouTube (most, although not all, of the soundtrack is available here).

I was hooked after about three songs, and overwhelmed when I was finally able to listen to the whole album all the way through. This is not just a good musical, and a useful hook to get high school students to pay attention in history classes: it’s one of the most impressive and important cultural works of the decade. There is so much more going on in the songs alone than just well-rhymed lyrics and excellent delivery. There are references to other significant works of musical theatre, and direct quotation of the historical figures embodied in the characters. There is also a constant theme throughout the story that while avarice and arrogance usually bring ruin, intelligence is the most valuable of a person’s assets, something to celebrate rather than quash. The musical presents us with a new view of the American Revolution: familiar topics such as Washington’s genius as a commander and Jefferson’s libido are addressed, but so are the seeds of the movements and arguments that we are still living with today–the continuations of the Civil Rights and women’s rights struggles, and the question of what it means to be American. Are you born one, or is it something you choose to become? This is something I think about a great deal, being a first-generation American whose right to be here has never been questioned because I happen to be Caucasian and able to alter my accent if I choose. I witnessed perhaps a handful of occasions where people were rude to my mother because she was so thoroughly not from the U.S., but for the most part those who noticed that she was English were either indifferent or interested in that fact–we were never told that we should go home if we couldn’t adapt and become “real” Americans. This has always highlighted for me that the bitter fight over immigration to this country is about race and ethnicity–I am accepted as part of the status quo, while people whose forebears arrived here decades and centuries before mine are still told to “go back to” Africa / Mexico / wherever. This is why it matters so much that well-known historical figures are performed by people of colour in this production–aside from the unprecedented audience engagement this has spurred, it creates a layer of meaning that would not be present were the performers all white. (If that bothers you, blame Shakespeare and Ben Jonson–they started it when they began to question the limits of gender in plays such as “As You Like It” and “Epicoene”.)

I am thrilled to bits that Miranda, Thomas Kail, and the magnificent cast are winning *all* the awards for their work, and are getting so much exposure for their other creative work. I cherished a hope for about half an hour that I’d be able to see the play with the original line-up at some point this year, until I saw the prices that tickets were going for and that most of the performances until the end of next year were pretty much sold out last February. Now I’m just holding out hope that there’s a full taping of an early stage performance somewhere and they’re just sitting on it until the national tour ends.

I was going to write about Miranda himself as well, but if I do this post may never end, so I’ll save it for a later post. (He is awesome in all kinds of ways, and I can’t think of any other public figure to have spent so much time engaging with his audience on a personal level just being nice. Check out his twitter feed some time.) The Tony awards are on this Sunday and will feature a live performance of a song from the show, for all the fans like me who are desperate to see as well as hear the real thing.

Friday Fave: Dark Hour of Noon

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This is the first novel that changed my life, that shaped a part of who I am. I was nine years old, wandering through my school’s library, looking for longer books with appealing covers because I was still at an age where I liked illustrations–it would be another couple of years before I started to dislike them because I found my imaginings of the characters to be so much more interesting. (This book is also the root of my dislike of the idiom that you can’t judge a book by its cover–I’ve discovered a number of excellent novels because I

was attracted by their covers. I do realize that’s irrelevant to the meaning of the saying, but it still irritates me.)

I knew about World War II–my father was a child in London during the Blitz, and my mother remembers the German POWs who worked for her father and other neighbours when she was very small. Our bookshelves at home are still lined with biographies of Churchill and dozens of histories of the military aspect of the conflict. I was always more interested in the social side of history, though, and beyond watching Hope and Glory every time it came on TV, I didn’t know much about that side of things at that point. I picked the book up because I was intrigued by the illustration, and I loved the title; there was no synopsis on the back of the book, and most of the excerpt on the inside of the front cover is a discussion between two characters about the mythological heroes of Poland. I may have thought it was in part a fantasy story–I’d already discovered fantasy at that age, and was enchanted by all things mythology-related.

Fantasy is is decidedly not, although it is nightmarish in many parts. It follows Trina, seven years old in 1939, as her world is torn up by the Nazi occupation of Poland. She watches what her friends and loved ones endure at the hands of the invading soldiers, and soon decides to fight back in whatever way she can. The novel chronicles Trina’s life during the war, and the ways that she and several like-minded children mounted what resistance they could to the occupation.

It is still my favourite novel about WWII, and my favourite YA novel. I don’t remember how many times I read in the three years between my discovering it and graduating the school whose library owned the only copy I could find. I looked for it in every bookshop I went into, every garage sale. Everyone always thought I was talking about Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon. A few years later I found another copy in the library of the elementary school attached to my high school and seriously considered how to steal it, leaving money in its place, but I never had the chance–it was not a room I routinely had access to, and I could hardly have come and gone unnoticed, as the librarians knew all the children they worked with. Then came the age of online book stores, just after I’d finished university, and Margaret found a pristine first edition for me one Christmas–one of the many reasons she’s an amazing friend. I shrieked like my nine-year-old self when I unwrapped it, much to my parents’ consternation. I spent that Christmas day re-reading the book, and have done so again many times since. It isn’t one of the books I carry around with me from country to country, because I’ve done my best to keep it from damage, but it is always on my favourites shelf.

It grieves me every time I see a list of books for children and teens about the Holocaust and this is not on it. At times I wonder if this is because too many parents and teachers found it too grim–it is grim subject matter, and unsparing in its depictions of the violence committed by the Nazi army and by those who resisted them–but most of the time I’m inclined to think it’s just because it wasn’t advertised successfully. Since the recent success of Elizabeth Wein’s excellent Codename: Verity and Rose Under Fire, as well as other YA novels such as A Northern Light, I keep hoping that it will be republished and get more attention. I’ve seen it mentioned in a few scholarly works on the representation of war in children’s fiction, but it doesn’t have the readership it deserves. I continue to hope it will be rediscovered, and that this will change.

Reading: Octavia Butler, Kindred

Kindred is a seminal work of science fiction. This is what I had been told, and this is what I went in to the book expecting. It’s not what I came out thinking (although I thought plenty of other things). Octavia Butler’s novel features a woman who finds herself inexplicably pulled through time whenever a particular person is in mortal peril, which unfortunately happens a lot. She is a black woman. He is a white man in early-19th century Maryland, the son of a slave plantation owner.

Published in 1979, Kindred is generally referred to as the first science fiction published by a black woman. 1979 was the year in which Margaret Thatcher was elected, Michael Jackson released “Off the Wall,” and five people protesting the KKK were shot and killed (by the KKK) in North Carolina. As relevant as the complex issues Butler raises in her book felt to me today, I truly can only imagine what they felt like to the average reader in 1979.

Cover of Octavia Butler's Kindred Butler’s writing is thoughtful and well-crafted, the pace of the story fast and yet each scene lingers. The relationships that Dana (the heroine) develops–with her white husband in both their own time and the antebellum South; with the slave-owning, abused boy to whom she is so oddly tied; and to the enslaved blacks on the plantation–are richly imagined.

That being said, I had a lot trouble reading this book as science fiction. Sure, Dana is pulled through time. That’s pretty weird. Turns out the guy is her distant relative. That’s intriguing. But there is no more exploration of that theme, and no investigation into what greater meaning it may have. The characters seem at best bemused.

I enjoy a lot of speculative fiction that doesn’t fit squarely within the box of a genre. And yes, science fiction has evolved a lot since 1979, but Dune had been out for 14 years, Star Wars for two; the genre was pretty well established. There is so very little in Kindred that could identify it with science fiction that I wonder if it hurts rather than helps the book’s tremendous power.

Reading this as a straight parable, or as historical fiction in which liberties are taken (see: Outlander…), might open it up to new readers. Far from diminishing Butler’s work, I would rather see it correctly homed so it could have the broader recognition it deserves.

Stuck for POC-authored sci fi? Try this excellent Buzzfeed list of 19 books, and one from Colorlines for comparison.

Still, perhaps I am not accounting sufficiently for the glass ceiling effect. Kindred does not constitute science fiction to me, but for a black woman to write herself in to a genre that had previously excluded her? That is extraordinary.

Have you read this or other works by Octavia Butler–forget that, by any person of color in this still very-white, very-male genre? Do you think I’m being too restrictive in my definition of science fiction? I’d love to hear what you think in the comments below.

Friday Fave: Angels in America

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I’m sure many of my friends are ~~sick of~~ familiar with hearing me go on about just how amazing so much of the television produced in the last fifteen years has been, how shows like the The Wire, Peaky Blinders, and Borgen have made screenplays not simply an offshoot of stage drama but something like a hybrid of plays and the serial novel from the days of Dickens and Wilkie Collins. It isn’t as though I didn’t like television to begin with, but there is a depth to these recent series–albeit not always in every season of some long-running ones–that rivals many of the films considered to be more serious art, which I think is a great pity. Six Feet Under was the first such series that I saw, back in 2002; it was like nothing I had ever seen, and I loved it. About a year and a half later the HBO production of Angels in America aired, and I was transfixed.

It was a play to begin with, of course, so adapting it for the screen was presumably less of a challenge than stories written as novels or other prose, but the freedom afforded by filming with regard to locations, sets, and special effects gave the scenes a dimension that just couldn’t be achieved on a stage. (My experience of drama is admittedly limited, but to my mind there are some plays that will always be better on stage than on screen; I do not think this is one of them.) I had heard of it when I was growing up and considered buying the script when I was in high school, but resisted because I wanted to see it on stage first. (I still haven’t had the chance, but I live in hope.)

From the opening scenes I thought the production was as close to perfect as could be; the ensuing years and numerous viewings have not altered my opinion. The casting was spot-on, particularly Mary-Louise Parker, Jeffrey Wright, and Al Pacino as the vile Roy Cohn. There are so many luminous moments in the six hours that I don’t have a favourite scene, although I do have a favourite line–Belize looking Cohn straight in the eye and saying “I am the antithesis of you.” Prior’s line about taking anti-depressants “in wee fistfuls” in his first dream-sequence meeting with Harper, and Harper’s vague query about why Mormons are thus named are close seconds. If there is a flaw at any point in the film, it is Emma Thompson getting too strident and manic as the Angel in her scenes with Hannah Pitt–for me a couple of those moments veered from the intense into the absurd.

The play is valuable for so many reasons. It’s an insight into the AIDS crisis of the 1980s, and the discrimination faced by the LBGTQ community, which much of our society still has so much trouble understanding. It’s a particularly haunting account of personal struggles with physical and mental illness, and of how fear can lead us to hurt those we love most. It’s also an insight into how the idea that the straight white Caucasian male is superior to all other genders, races, ethnicities, and sexual orientations can damage just about anyone, even those who believe most strongly in the idea–even when they are among those disadvantaged by such a position, such as Hannah Pitt and Roy Cohn.

Beyond–or underlying–all this is the fact that it’s a beautiful work of literature, and that the television production is a gorgeous example of what can be done on a screen. Aside from the fact that I am a staunch feminist and I believe strongly that the rights of the African-American community, people of colour, and the LGBTQ community continue to be suppressed and infringed upon in this country, I get frustrated with commentary on works such as Angels in America, Between the World and Me, and Hamilton that dismiss them out of hand because they “advance a liberal agenda.” Dismissing these and other such works because they portray a worldview you have no experience of or familiarity with is to miss the point of what good art is, and what it can achieve. It is possible to be able to appreciate a work while still disagreeing with its central premise, or actively disliking the person who created it (*cough cough* Woody Allen, Roman Polanski). Refusing to listen to / read / watch something because you do not share the perspective of the creator or protagonist(s) is as absurd as saying that a woman shouldn’t read Tom Jones and can’t enjoy its humor because she’s not a randy and yet hopelessly romantic young man, or that only men with military experience should watch Band of Brothers–another near-perfect example of filmmaking–because it fails the Bechdel and DuVernay tests. Badly. Such refusals are as dismissive of our cultural inheritance as the proverbial reduction of the Western Canon to a single-semester course in “dead white men”, because they deny that we still have art that is vital and creative and new, and that all of the techniques and facets of language those same dead white men used, and in some cases created or perfected, are still present and alive in these new works. (If characters being portrayed by people of different races and genders bothers you, blame Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, and Sarah Bernhardt; Lin-Manuel Miranda was not the first to hit on the idea.)

Margaret wrote an excellent review of Between the World and Me a few weeks ago, in case you didn’t read it the first time. I will have more to say on Lin-Manuel Miranda, Hamilton, and its amazing cast at some point in the (hopefully near) future. If you haven’t seen Angels in America, or haven’t seen it in a long time, give it a try. It’s held up well in the years since its filming.

The Friday Fave: Samantha Bee

I miss Jon Stewart’s incarnation of The Daily Show every day. I knew I would, although I expected to like Trevor Noah a little more than I do, and I thought we’d see more of Jessica Williams and Hasan Minhaj than we have. Trevor Noah is doing a fair job, considering the shoes he had to fill, and is definitely improving–the Lindsay Graham episode was excellent. (If you haven’t seen it, try to catch it on the Comedy Central site before it’s taken down.) Nonetheless, the feel of the show is very different now.

I’ve been watching the show since its first incarnation with Craig Kilborn, and Stewart since he hosted Short Attention Span Theater. When Stewart took over from Kilborn, he shaped it into the platform for satire and biting commentary that it became–under Kilborn there was more pure silliness and every episode ended with a mock game show, if I remember correctly. Not that Jon Stewart’s tenure didn’t include a fair amount of pure silliness as well, but the moments I miss the most were the times when they kept the commentary to a minimum because it was so simple to show up the politicians and pundits just by playing things they’ve said at different times back to back. Speaking solely for myself, I’ve found the Republican primary race–not least Trump’s appalling and repellent performance–a tiny bit harder to endure without him. I missed the blend of acerbity and absurdity that Stewart’s crew perfected, and I worried that it would live on only in John Oliver’s show on HBO. (Larry Wilmore’s The Nightly Show is awesome, but of a completely different format, far more conversation and debate among guests than mockery and satire.)

I worried a little too much, as usual. Samantha Bee took a large part of what made The Daily Show great when she went over to create Full Frontal for TBS, and it is every bit as good. Unlike TDS and John Oliver’s Last Week Tonight, she doesn’t organize her program necessarily around the events of the past few days but focuses on specific topics that have been relevant for a matter of weeks, months, or, in many cases, years. She is also every bit as capable of making me–and my Conservative father–laugh hard enough to cry.

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She deals with many of the same political topics that TDS, LWT, and other political comedy programs do, but she spends a good bit of the (too little) time she has looking at how the issues or events at hand affect not simply the country as a whole or a political class or income group, but at women in particular, and other minorities. Given the recent onslaught of state bills targeting women’s reproductive rights and the attempts to overturn both the ACA and the Roe v. Wade decision at the federal level–not to mention the attempts to block the LBGT community from marrying, adopting children, working without harassment, and using the bathroom–we desperately need this, and more like it. Jon Stewart and his TDS crew perfected this technique of keeping an audience informed while making them laugh, something essential to us as a society since the news networks have begun to sacrifice truth and actual news for the sake of propaganda, pandering, and feel-good segments.

Samantha Bee’s Full Frontal is on Monday nights at 10:00, and I believe the episodes that have already aired are available on the TBS website and on YouTube. In the meantime, here’s a taste: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dDfpGdk3HgQ