Asking the Wrong Questions

I think that I need to take out a subscription to the London Review of Books .  I had a year's free subscription up until a few months ago, courtesy of Dan Hartland , but I neglected to renew it.  At the time it didn't feel as if the fact that 95% of the magazine's content is smart, erudite, and well written was quite enough to justify spending the money, especially when there's so much else to read for free, but today I'm reminded of the, perversely enough, more appealing fact that the other 5% of LRB articles are just as smart, just as erudite, and just as well-written, but also batshit insane.  Previous standouts include pieces like Judith Butler's "Who Owns Kafka?" (March 3rd, 2011), in which Butler piles one unconvincing, flawed argument over another for why Israel shouldn't take possession of the papers of Franz Kafka, instead of just coming out and saying that it's because of the occupation of the Palestinian territories, and Jenny Turn...

For the last month, Strange Horizons has been running its annual fund drive, during which we raise money to keep the magazine running and its contributors paid.  Strange Horizons is run by a volunteer staff (including yours truly), and pays professional rates to its contributors.  With one week to go, the drive is now at just over $5,000 out of an $8,000 goal, though there are also "stretch goals" all the way to $11,000, which will allow us to increase the pay rates for poetry and reviews, and to add weekly podcasts of the magazine's fiction.  The fund drive page--with information about prizes being raffled off to donors, and Kickstarter-style rewards for various donation levels (including, for $100, the option to select a book to be reviewed by the reviews department)--can be found here , and at the Strange Horizons blog editor-in-chief Niall Harrison has been keeping a tally of testimonials about the magazine from authors and reviewers (including Genevieve Valentine...

We're coming near to the end of what has been a singularly unimpressive pilot season.  Progress report on the shows I've stuck with: Revolution has so far failed to ignite and if it doesn't within the next few weeks I'll probably ditch it.  Vegas 's second episode bored me, so it's been dropped.  Elementary , on the other hand, had a strong second episode that deepened the two main characters, but the show still doesn't feel much like Holmes.  Last Resort is maintaining the intensity of its pilot but still not giving the impression that it has an idea of where to take its premise.  There are still a few stragglers left, and they'll be trickling on screen over the next month, but right now I'm willing to pronounce the 2012 fall pilot season a bust.  Better luck next year. The Paradise - The BBC's prospective answer to Downton Abbey draws loosely from the novel Au Bonheur des Dames ( The Ladies' Paradise ) by Émile Zola, moving its actio...

Well, that was a long week and a half of new TV, and with not much to show for it in the end.  These write-ups represent a small minority of the new shows to premiere this fall--I haven't said anything about the season's new comedies, which run the gamut from terrible ( Partners ), to underwhelming ( Ben and Kate , The Mindy Project ), to competent but uninspiring ( Go On , Animal Practice ) , to bizarre Alf retreads ( The Neighbors ).  There are some more new shows premiering later this month, but so far I'm not very enthusiastic about this new crop of shows. Vegas - The premise of this show, which follows the (presumably fictionalized) exploits of legendary Las Vegas Sheriff Ralph Lamb (Dennis Quaid) in the early 60s, marks it as yet another attempt, after the failure of last year's Pan Am and The Playboy Club , to crack the Mad Men code for a network audience (only this time without pesky women running around all over the place--there is only one woman in the ...

I watched Looper two nights ago, and since coming out of the movie theater I've been trying to work out just why this film left me feeling so unimpressed.  It's not that there's anything wrong with Looper , which in fact wears the crown of intelligent, thought-provoking SF filmmaking better than almost any other claimant to that title in the last few years.  It's well-made, intelligent, and handles its time travel premise in brave and interesting ways.  But it's also an almost airless work, one whose pieces never managed to engage me enough to make me care about its whole. A lot of this comes down to the kind of filmmaker Rian Johnson is.  Johnson's breakout film Brick was a pastiche that drew its power from a gimmick--that its high school age characters spoke like characters out of classic noir--but it elevated itself above a mere mash-up through its dedication to its style, and with the help of a magnetic, soulful central performance by Joseph Gordon-Levit...

Here's a recommendation: even if you've already read it, take the time to reread Wolf Hall before reading Bring Up the Bodies .  This is less in order to be reminded of details from the first volume of Hilary Mantel's projected trilogy about the life of Thomas Cromwell--Mantel is actually quite good about catching up readers who haven't read Wolf Hall or read it a while ago, and anyway the broad strokes of the history it describes are well known--but because such a reading actually shows both books in the best light.  Wolf Hall is a much easier novel to appreciate when freed of the hype that surrounded its Booker nomination and victory in 2009, and even more than that, when approached as the first volume in a trilogy rather than a complete novel, and Bring Up the Bodies feels like a more complete, more polished work when compared to its accomplished but undeniably baggy and overlong predecessor.  This is, of course, largely down to subject matter and scope-- Wolf Ha...

Well, here we are again, in fall pilot season.  As has become traditional, we have a drizzle of new shows this week, followed by a deluge next week, so for now I'm fresh and energized enough to write quite a bit about each new show.  By next week, I suspect, I'll be a little more punchy. The Mob Doctor - I try not to be one of those people who assume that cable television is inherently superior to network television, and who say, of every failed network show, that it would have been so much better on HBO.  This is not only because there's plenty of excellent network TV out there, but because cable TV has its own set of tropes and core assumptions that I would hate to see television become consumed by, such a tendency to treat sexual violence and female nudity as hallmarks of artistic maturity, and a preference for borderline- or outright-psychopathic male leads that relegates female character almost exclusively to the contingent roles of love interest and caretaker....