19 Poker Face

I love this show! Another beautiful loser! Charlie has to lose at the end of each episode so she has to move on to the next place.

I have a lot to say about the show Poker Face. Some of it is structural. Some of it is character. Some of it is just viewing experience.

Let's start with what works.

Charlie! Highly engaging, empathetic, relatable, kind, cares about her friends, even the new ones she just met. This is so appealing. She picks up an obnoxious stray dog that won't stop barking at her. She befriends the obnoxious drummer boy who the rest of the band can't stand and kick out. She likes the old anarchist ladies who are kind of dicks to everyone. She's such a great character! She stops and talks to everyone along the way, people someone else might skip over or be rude to, such that this is a constant feature of solving her story of the week. She befriends everyone! I love her.

Also she sounds exactly like Marge Simpson. I don't know what to do with that information, except of course we love Marge Simpson. Maybe smoke less? I don't know. 

She's being Columbo, like really clearly is being Columbo, with a big sweater or jacket instead of his trench coat. So that might be part of the voice. It's so gravelly sometimes that it's distracting. And sometimes she's not doing that voice at all. I don't know that either.

So I love Charlie.

There are lots of big name familiar guest stars. That helps Miss No New Faces Face Blindness a huge amount! No lie, that makes it work for me because I can recognize those people. They HAVE faces for me. I can't always place who they are but I will identify them again even if they change their clothes. Look. I'll go, "Who is that lady in the glasses? I know her." And then later get on IMDb and go, "Ohhhh, S. Epatha Merkerson!" How in the world do I know her? Look down her list of credits. She was in Jacob's Ladder, which I saw in grad school in the 90s, but once I know your face, I know it forever. Actually it was her voice that got me.

Oddly I just discovered last night, reading the IMDb cast credits, that my no new faces face blindness is getting better. I looked down the whole list of cast and got pings of recognition from a bunch of people who were new to me in the 7 episodes I watched yesterday. That's awesome! Thanks, Poker Face!

Here's what works less well:

The Johnson Maneuver. You know how Rian Johnson loves to show you something, then turn it around and show it to you again only now you understand it a whole different way? Yes, that's very cool, except in Glass Onion where a lot didn't make sense after you'd seen it once, but see that post for that. 

Every single episode of this show does the Johnson Maneuver. It's exhausting. Because the things we see twice are all guest actors, which means we know they're only in it this episode. We can't get invested. Which means we're just sitting there watching some random people play out their drama. 

I can't tell you how off-putting this is. It's like getting fooled with the same card trick over and over and over and OVER. Stop it. 

Also yes of course you're going to be able to make us see things one way then another. You literally hold all the cards. Stop being someone's boring uncle at a wedding, doing the same card trick repeatedly to the same people. 

It's like lying to someone then going "Haha, you believed me!" Hi, I am punching you in the face right now.

So that's annoying.

Also the client drama takes up literally half of the episode quite often, by time, which means a lot of time where Charlie isn't even there. Except twist! It turns out SHE WAS THERE the whole time! We just didn't get to see her! THAT IS INFURIATING. Why do you have a drama where your main character is there but not seen until we've watched half of the episode???

So it's an open mystery. We watch the story unfold, then we watch it again from another angle as Charlie figures out what happens. But it's all dramatic irony. We know and watch her not knowing. I guess that's fun? It's fun to know and see someone figure it out, Columbo style.

I have to watch Columbo again and see just how long the client part is. In my memory it's quite short. I've been thinking of every other show I've seen that begins with client-only sections and they're never more than a minute.

Because--and this is essential--we don't know or care about these people. It gets to be like, "Oh boy, more randos to get bait and switched by, who cares?" Because we know they'll be taken away soon.

Look at a show like Wonderfalls where we meet characters *through Jaye* and care about them because she cares about them. We're here for Jaye, though. It's just bananas to me that this show is structured like that. It's not even history leading up to the point when Charlie joins the picture, either. It's flashbacks to a time when she's there but not visible. Why on earth?

Anyway.

The structure of this show is seriously problematic for me. Like I'm mad going into each episode because of the long client section.

How about you just tell a story without all the backfill? Do it from the point where Charlie joins them. Have the backstory just be backstory. Skip the Johnson Maneuver (sounds worse every time I say it) and tell a story instead of being tricky about it. It really is a gimmick. And although it worked in Knives Out, it did not work in Glass Onion, and it's not working here because it becomes annoying very quickly. Same card trick! Stop it!

Here's a show that tells every story twice every episode. How do you not see how terrible that is as a plan? That is a terrible plan. That is two-card Rashomon. 

The pilot also threw me immediately because it started with a flashback we couldn't possibly know was a flashback because we were new to the whole thing. You see (spoilers) a hotel cleaner see something and report it, then the security guy murders her husband and then her. I think? Hard to say--it's in darkness and you can't actually see the people. But then there she is again. I think? Again, face blindness. So then I thought he killed someone else and it was foreshadowing killing her. Or he got the wrong people. I was waiting to hear he killed the wrong people. And then the husband has that same recognizable pearl-handled gun from the murders. How did he get that? Did he go to the murder scene? Except no, it's supposed to be that that part was in flashback. 

Even if I could recognize faces, it would have been insanely confusing.

What threw me personally off was that the cleaner woman had her hair pulled back while working, then loose while going home. SO I DIDN'T KNOW IT WAS HER. OMG it's confusing being me.

I had to explain can't learn new faces to some new doctor person. I said: if I see you next week, I won't recognize you. That is just the facts. I won't! I can't remember my own doctor's face. I know she has blondish longish hair and is about my height, maybe a little less, slender build. I think glasses sometimes? Maybe not. Faces. Why do we even have them if I can't register them. 

So having big curly hair in one scene but a ponytail in another scene, also with a change of clothes, that means I don't know whether it's the same person. Especially given we already saw the one woman get murdered. So presumably this is a different one? No? See.

Try a chyron. 24 hours ago. Yesterday. Something.

Also the pilot was a thriller and the rest are cute and funny, which seems like a mislead. 

There's more to say about mysteries being honest and fair with the audience. A mystery has to play fair. It has to give you the information, even if you don't understand the significance at that moment. Withholding information is cheating. I have strong feelings about this drawn from reading all of Agatha Christie multiple times. Agatha Christie plays fair. Rian Johnson does not always play fair. I don't know who's in charge of this show, but the show doesn't always play fair either. 

It's okay if we don't know things, like if we lack expertise, but the puzzle pieces should all be on the table. Some of these episodes were fair and some weren't. 

Anyway, Charlie is super appealing. People like her and she likes people so we like her a lot. I want to spend time with her. Not, for example, a bunch of new characters we'll never see again after this. Like, every time, it comes out with: invest your energy in this--it is sure to be wasted!

I'm trying to break down in my head how many episodes are about busting the bad people for doing something bad. I think maybe all of them. That's awesome. I'm in favor of that. I think it would be better done straightforwardly without all the timeline shenanigans and hiding Charlie from us so we're misled and see things she doesn't see that she then has to figure out. 

However, I adore the helping people mandate. That's what I'm here to see! That's what I wanted the show for, to compare to Wonderfalls and the other helping people shows. How is it set up? What's the logic? What's the reasoning? What's the story logic for it? 

I like how Charlie just shows up and goes: hey, wait a minute, this is no good, what are the rights and wrongs of it? Who's the good guy here? Who's the bad guy? Asks questions, researches, figures it all out, then wreaks justice and vengeance upon the people who want to hurt or exploit others. My very favorite is the thing she does at the end of the pilot where she seems to be trapped in a tight spot, but she has set things up so that the villain totally loses just when they thought they won.

I'm watching a Columbo episode right now and it is EXACTLY like Poker Face, a very long first part where we meet the people and see the crime carried out. 11 minutes in already and no sign of Columbo himself. It's all setting up who did what and why they did it. Jeez, it's so seventies in look. 1972. Takes me back to my childhood, how people look. I was five. 12:45, Columbo appears!!

There is some hilarious background acting going on here. People talking and talking with bobbing heads. There is a ludicrously shirtless man in a hard hat on a construction site.

The criminals are underestimating Columbo. I remember this was a thing. He plays dumb quite a lot. 

There is also hilariously dubbed in dialogue without room tone. And all these rooms without ceilings. And that lighting they always have that makes big stark distracting shadows behind everyone. And so much smoking! So funny. A man playing tennis in long pants, a shirt, and a jacket, while the woman playing opposite is in her little tennis outfit. A hat with a bunch of obvious tomato sauce on it that is meant to be blood. Really it's like watching a play, where you have to suspend disbelief so vigorously all the time.

Anyway. Research continues. Columbo has to find out what happened because he's a detective. Jaye Tyler has to figure things out because the tchotchke animals make her or else they'll drive her crazy. Police or law or medical shows have obvious reasons for trying to solve problems. What reason do others have for working on these things? Charlie doesn't seem to have a reason and that's okay, but she also has this magic lie detector ability that needs a way to play out. That's an external reason, though. Don't we want an internal reason? 

I have only ever seen a little of My Name is Earl but it has a wonderful story engine. I like it when there's a strong internal story engine like that. But then I'm from olden times. Maybe we don't need it as much now? Like what drives Supernatural? Those boys driving around in their car. I only watched the pilot so I don't know what makes it go. Vengeance for their mother or something? 

Look what IMDb says: "John Winchester raised his two sons Sam and Dean to hunt and kill all things that go 'bump in the night' after his wife Mary was murdered by an evil supernatural being when the boys were little. 22 years later the brothers set out on a journey, fighting evil along the way, to find their recently-missing father; when they finally do he reveals he knows what demon killed their mother and has found a way to track and kill it. Meanwhile, Sam develops frightening abilities such as seeing visions of people dying before it actually happens. These visions are somehow connected to the demon that murdered his mother and its mysterious plans that seem to be all about Sam. When their father dies striking a deal with that very same demon, the brothers determine to finish his crusade."

Crusade! That's a good story engine. Fifteen years of episodes from that, huh? Cute boys and a mighty mission with practically infinite permutations for each episode.

Think think think.

18 Story Engine and Wonderfalls

I'm looking at story engine here in terms of the element that drives a series, whether TV or novel. For example, in the TV show Wonderfalls, there are little animal tchotchkes that give Jaye obscure orders about how to help someone. She has to help the person to make the animals shut up and leave her alone. That engine drives the whole show.

So if I'm developing an idea for a series, what should I use as a story engine? 

I get into all sorts of series here, from procedurals to cozy mystery novels.

I think I might have solved my series idea, what with how I'm not in a sensible position to be writing a TV pilot these days. I mean. But what should I do with it? I think I've got a workable plan now.

Also working on finishing the novel draft OMG. I have a couple of issues I have to solve. It would help if I would stop cutting down trees and injuring myself. Go sit down and write your book!

Sacred cheese of life!

17 How to read the classics

As someone who makes (often unwilling) young people read classics as my regular job, a question I get a lot is: how do I learn to like these things?

They bounce off. It happens! Everyone has modern expectations of narrative, which is to say, fast-paced, fitting a certain pattern, full of cliffhangers and other excitement. The chunky cloth covers and small type put them off. The feeling that this is steamed broccoli meant to be good for you is definitely not helping.

There are a couple great roads into finding ways to love the classics. And I say that as someone who makes people read them practically daily. I also adore them. I talk a lot about genre fiction and so on here, but the classics are my whole thing. The older the better.

Here's how you get into them:

One, try listening to an audiobook instead of reading. Truly, it counts exactly the same. The voice actors interpret for you and make sense out of the long sentences. Downsides: it takes a lot longer, if you read fast at all, and you can't make notes on it, unless you're following along on the page. Which lots of people do! If this is something you ever need to write a paper about, definitely follow along on the page so you can put a post-it note where it needs to go.

Two, slow down. Slow way down. The pacing is much slower than modern fiction. It takes some getting used to. Even the sentences are often longer and more complex. The language and vocabulary and usage is different. When someone in a book written in 1800 is "making love" to someone, they are not having sex, okay? They are charming or romancing that person. You might want a book with footnotes to help with this sort of thing. Get a second-hand anthology if it has full texts.

Three, prep. Read a synopsis first so you know who's who and what on earth is going on. There's nothing wrong with watching a movie adaptation of a text before you read it. If it's a play, definitely watch it first! I don't think people should read plays anyway. It's like reading a recipe and expecting to be full. Those are directions for a thing, not a thing. But at minimum hit Wikipedia and read a synopsis so you know what the hell is going on.

Four, learn the background and context before you even start reading so you're not totally lost or confused by a truly alien culture compared to ours. An edition with a good foreword can be great for this. 

Five, a more complex point: remember that people back then were just as snarky and sarcastic as we are. Chaucer was snarky as hell. Sophocles loved putting people in impossibly awkward situations. Jane Austen was extremely sarcastic about people and their flaws. They were the same as us.

Take the first sentence of Pride and Prejudice: "It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of good fortune must be in want of a wife." Okay, does she mean that, or is she being ironic? 

We figure out very quickly she's being ironic when Mrs. Bennet comes flying in and says a rich man has rented a house in the neighborhood, what a great thing for our girls! She has all these marriage-aged daughters and an aging husband and NO MONEY, no security, not even a house as they will lose it if the husband dies. One of those girls needs to marry this rich man and be able to take care of everyone else! 

Does he want to get married? Who is he? What's he like? Nobody knows anything about him except: rich and unmarried. But it's a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of good fortune must be in want of a wife, after all, so let's go get him, girls!

I've had students say this makes everyone shallow and so forth. No! Women of their class could not go out and work. They had to get married to support themselves. Yes, you can be upper class and poor. This is also shocking to modern Americans.

So knowing that background changes the first sentence, right? Now we get it. The joke is that everyone assumes this guy who just rented a house wants to get married. Let's all go see him and see which sister he wants to marry! It's embarrassing to the two oldest sisters, but the younger ones are kind of idiots like the mom. 

Six, if it doesn't ruin the story for you, get spoilers! Who marries whom? How do we get from here to there? There are many obstacles in the way. How do Jane and Lizzy not absolutely die of embarrassment from the behavior of their mother and sisters?

It helps to get the tone and plot beforehand, truly. Like if I am teaching The Iliad as I often do, I tell the class: okay, spoilers, here's who won the war. So that lets us see one hero as tragic, the other as favored by the gods. And the gods literally show up and help or hinder these people! 

Seven, tone. Jane Austen is being funny. It helps to know that. She's writing about the serious business of finding a husband and having a life. She writes about Lizzy's friend making an awful choice, but a choice that lets her survive. But she's being very funny about all the intricacies of trying to find a person you could marry and live with when it's deadly serious survival, but also absurd. It's easier to see this in a film adaptation, where everyone is trying not to roll their eyes every time Mr. Collins goes on and on about Lady Catherine, who treats him like dirt even while he's fawning over her and pretending that his connection with her makes him something special. Look how complex and human and funny that is.

Eight, start with something you like. Do you like war stories? Henry V. Do you like the supernatural? Dracula, Frankenstein, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Do you like stories about young people figuring it out? Austen, Dickens. 

Nine, take a class. Sometimes you just need someone to walk you through them as you go. I swear I have shepherded dozens (hundreds? oh no) of classes through the densest classics and showed them how they are awesome. You can take a class, but make sure the person teaching it loves these texts AND can show you what's great about them. (Not everybody does, fair warning.) Also ultimately you're going to have to sit down and read them.

Ten, I hate to say just do it, because I find it nearly impossible to sit through 95% of nonfiction and saying "just do it" doesn't help me. I will be up and doing something else within five minutes and I will not retain anything I've read. Yes, I've read lots of nonfiction, and no, it doesn't help me get any better at it. I have to MAKE myself read it. Put the phone far away, get a relevant beverage, and sit there. I find the hardest barrier to get over is the initial one where you have to turn everything else off and sit there.

A few more strategies to try: 

• Take notes as you go, even if it's like "p278 Genji is a complete perv about some new actual child and says he's not." Taking notes helps, for real. It makes you focus on taking info out of what you're reading.
• Ask questions as you read. Write them down. Is Genji ever going to realize what a horrible user of a person he is? (No.) Is Genji going to get attacked by wild dogs that eat his liver? (Alas, no.)
  
• Setting a timer helps because then you don't read to the point of failure, which makes you hate doing it. Read for five minutes and stop. Read for ten minutes and stop. 
• Read a set number of pages. Don't keep going if you're not absorbing it.
  
• Cast the roles in your head so it's more vivid. 
• Imagine texting what you read to a friend. Or if you won't get distracted by touching that phone, ACTUALLY text it to a friend. 
• Get a friend to read along! That can be fantastic if you're struggling equally. Team reading.
• Draw brief sketches of what you're reading. This works very well for visual readers as you have to convert the story into images.
• Get mad about it. This got us through what we called "Frigging Genji," truly. Want to read something maddening? Here's someone presented as a hero who's a terrible philanderer and pedophile and child rapist. But it's written so brilliantly that if the person portrayed read it, they'd be like, yes, I am awesome and justified, it's true. They wouldn't be offended. While others reading would be backing away in horror. We all hated Genji so much! Hating a character is surprisingly effective in driving your reading forward. Unfortunately he doesn't get murdered by a child as we all hoped. Oh well. In my version he would be. 
• Articulate what's working and what's not working. This is extremely effective for me. Not just "I don't like it" but "I hate how the author writes women in xyz ways." Bonus, you can turn this into a paper if you do it right. My first academic publication came from something like this.
  

Classics are classics for good reasons. That doesn't mean you will like them if you go in cold. Sometimes you need a guide or other strategies to help you get to the good parts. Never take it as a reflection on you if you don't like something, though. Some of these things are not for you. 

The reason to get familiar with the classics is that they're part of the conversation you want to understand. You know how every TV show has a Rashomon episode? You want to see the original Rashomon so you get it. 

Once my VW bus broke down in Grass Valley CA and I was stuck for a couple of days waiting for a part, with nothing to do but read the paperback Shakespeare collection I'd stuck in there for emergencies. A few years later, a friend and I were watching My Own Private Idaho. I gradually freaked out because it was absolutely Henry IV. They even quoted from it. I kept saying, "This is Henry IV." My friend got mad because he was an English major with a master's and hadn't caught it and I was a composer conservatory dropout in those days. So maybe this isn't the best anecdote, or possibly it's a brag, if being a dropout with a broken down VW bus is a brag. (It definitely is not.) But knowing those plays absolutely affected how I saw that movie. 

Can you enjoy it without understanding all that? Sure! But why not get the whole thing, not just a piece of the picture? It's good to know where you are in the whole conversation that is fiction.

16 "Objects in Space"

Episode 16 Objects in Space is up!

*******

Very strange to rewatch the series! Strange how much I'd forgotten about this specific episode, one of my favorites. 

For ages I couldn't understand how the show didn't make it, because I loved it so much, but now I get it. The tone and angle of the episodes are all over the place. One heartfelt, one silly, one dramatic, one truly violent, one horror, one a heist, and so on. I could see how that would make the money people extremely nervous. How would an audience know what to expect?

I suspect the fans like me were there for the characters and the world more than anything else. If you're a character person, you'll take anything that lets you spend time with those characters. Not that there's anything wrong with these stories! They're all wonderful. But they are unpredictable. Compare to a sitcom or a procedural or a regular drama. They deliver the same goods every week. This does not.

Anyway.

"Out of Gas" is the episode I wanted to look at specifically because it's about treating people like objects. 

There's a bounty hunter, Jubal Early, who is after River and Simon. He shuts the crew in their bunks and then runs into Kaylee. He says truly appalling things to Kaylee and threatens her with rape. There's no earthly reason to have that in the episode, obviously--he beats up Mal and Book and Simon, so non-sexual violence is on the table--so I have to wonder whether it's the treating people like objects theme that's doubled as Early treats River as an object to be retrieved and returned for the bounty, not as a person. 

In the end, Mal throws Early (in a spacesuit) off the ship and into space to die. He will become an object in space himself. 

Early says something about Serenity's design as he is forcing Simon to search the ship for River, something about how he likes the ship's design--people don't appreciate the shape of things, objects in space--but he says a lot of weird things in passing and Simon lets it go. 

Objects in space is such an odd phrasing. What ISN'T an object in space? Everything is. But I suppose what it means is: the way things fit into and belong in the spaces they're in.

I removed two chairs from my living room today. You think that didn't entirely change the nature of this space? It's astounding. Space and the way objects fit into it or obstruct it or clutter it. Mise en scene. Oh the relief when I take anything extra or awkward out of my house.

Early is an invader of Serenity when they're far away from everything. He invades the ship, but then when they can't find River, she gets on the comm and says she isn't on the ship, she IS the ship. Simon jokes that he can't keep track of her even when she's not incorporeally possessing a spaceship. It's River's disappearance and her mysterious takeover of the comm that lets her communicate with everyone, almost telepathically, and organize their resistance and attack and success.

Space invaders, crossing boundaries, obviously the overt spoken threat of rape, identifying the spaceship with a body and entering it against everyone's will, then River becoming the ship and organizing everyone to kick Early out and kill him. There's so much in this episode about bodily autonomy and violence. It's a simple story: invader enters, hurts people, locks everyone in or ties them up, but then they organize and kick him out and kill him. So is it a rape revenge fantasy? Maybe so. 

Early treats all of the crew as objects. Look what he does. Beats up Mal, drops him down into his bunk. Locks Mal, Jayne, Zoe, and Wash into their bunks. Beats up Shepherd Book. Threatens Kaylee with rape and ties her up to use as leverage. Knocks Simon around but needs him to find River. Beats up Inara and locks her into her shuttle. River is the ninth character but she escapes. We never see her go. She just disappears. 

Want to talk about the fantasy that Firefly thrives on, of being mobile and independent and able to get away from anywhere you don't want to be? This is a huge fantasy of mine. I used to have dreams of a shuttlecraft from Star Trek: The Next Generation. A runabout from DS9. Any mobile, independent self-contained space, with power, heating and cooling, a bathroom with bathtub, a kitchen, a couch, a desk/table, a bed. Make it a caravan of a diverse crew of misfits that form a found family. Just like DS9, Farscape, STTNG, Battlestar Galactica. No coincidence, all my favorite shows. 

Mind blown. I want it!

I never wanted to live on the Enterprise. Too antiseptic and too dangerous. Deep Space Nine, absolutely--I had invented a character for myself and everything. I dreamed multiple times I was on the Promenade. DS9 is found family while TNG is not. TNG people had it together far too much to be found family--and they were all Starfleet, anyway. Moya on Farscape would be the ship for me, though that gives me an anxiety surge just thinking about it. Never mind, DS9!

"Out of Gas" taps into something truly profound for a self-contained episode about a bounty hunter who breaks into the ship, beats up the crew, and gets booted right back out.

15 Treating People Like Things. "So much water so close to home" and The Hollow

Update: 

Episode 15 is up. It turned out to be about "So much water so close to home" and Agatha Christie's novel The Hollow.  

Previous post below:

***** 

I think I'm going to work on a short story I hate called "So much water so close to home" by Raymond Carver. 

Here's why I hate it: it gets under your skin. And because it's a male writer writing from a female POV about a deeply upsetting topic with a powerful gender divide to it. But even that is different now from how it used to be, or else I think about it differently. The future! It's more nuanced than the past! I also hate how realistic it is. I hate how she goes back to him at the end. I hate the drive with the green pickup. I hate so very many things about it.

Sometimes you're supposed to hate things about a story. That's the point of the story sometimes. 

How can I get mad that Carver thought about the man's wife's point of view more than the man's? What is up with my brain that I would even think that?

Anyway I recommend reading this story before listening to the podcast. 

Not that I've recorded it yet. Here is why:

The power company trimming back trees and chipping them.

The landlord building his house bang bang bang.

The road out front getting repaved.

Barky barky barky.

And the eternal road noise.

Also my innards were trying to kill me for the past few weeks but I have prevailed by way of Austerity and Not Being An Idiot. And Bloodwork. And next week a CT scan. Whee. They had another good go at me today, though, boy oh boy. 

The enemy within. Or something. The call is coming from inside the house. Inter arma enim silent leges? 

I feel like rewatching DS9 but the pacing is EXCRUCIATING now. Oh, olden times. So slow!

Goddamn, I hate this story. 

Want a quick synopsis?

Some guys go on a fishing trip and find a dead woman in the creek. But rather than lose their vacation, they just tie her to a tree and LEAVE HER THERE and spend the next two days or so fishing and drinking and washing their dishes in the creek RIGHT NEAR HER. They come back home and everyone finds out what monsters they are and the narrator silently freaks out, smashes some dishes, goes to the woman's funeral, gets chased and bothered en route, comes home, and for whatever earthly reason forgives her husband. WHY.

I mean, people do.

But that's horrifying to me. You're married to someone who cares so little for women that he'd leave a dead woman in a creek TIED TO A TREE so she won't float away for several days so he can GO FISHING.

If this were a class, I'd ask: would they have done that if it were a man? Obviously not. No way. To me that's what this story is about: how callous men are toward women. Pay any attention at all to true crime and this is the entire theme of it. Women's bodies are nothing but objects to be treated any old way these men want to treat them, then disposed of as garbage, not like they were ever people at all. They don't see women as people, alive or dead.

It happens CONSTANTLY. If that doesn't make you enraged, I can't begin to fathom why not. 

In the story, the narrator character sees this about her husband, is furious and repulsed by him, and then accepts him again by the end. Now granted it would be a very different story otherwise, but even within the story it's nauseating to have that juxtaposition of events. It's framed in terms of sex, refusing him, pushing him away, then inviting him back. That's super gross juxtaposed with the dumped naked corpse. Again with the true crime, but if a body is dumped naked, that's sexual assault.

I think it's okay to break up with someone when you find out that they don't think people like you are people. Put it that way. It's not everyone. (Not all men.) So if you find out he's one of the ones who doesn't think women are people, then get gone. 

I feel pretty strongly about this. Someone who doesn't think people like you are people--stay with me here--doesn't think people like you are people. And they will do whatever they want to you, because you're not people. Maybe it doesn't really become a problem until they're crossed or cranky or humiliated, but then there it is.

But there are a lot of ways to read this story. Maybe it's about forgiveness, or redemption (what has he done to deserve to be redeemed?) or gender imbalance, or eighteen million other things.

It would be a good story to teach because it's not clear what it's saying, so readers have to interpret for themselves, which also brings out biases and excuses and why some people get to behave certain ways and others don't. It would be a nightmare to teach because 18 year olds haven't articulated their assumptions yet or identified them as such and believe they're just truths. It would be easier to teach now than say 20-30 years ago because modern kids are infinitely more capable of talking calmly about sex and murder and violence and know infinitely more about it.

I'm just saying though, imagine four women on a camping trip alone with a naked dead man in the creek, tied to a tree by his hand. You can't see that to begin with. But also you can't see them fishing and drinking and hanging out like that. It's impossible. Because they would see that murder victim as a person.

Well anyway. That should be a fun podcast, between the nail gun and the wood chipper and the road paver. And the rage.

The road paver machines are fascinating and terrifying. They shoot orange flames out from underneath and cook the pavement as it goes down. The men working around them are in heavy gray clouds of choking fumes and incredible heat. Even driving by, I roll up all the windows and try not to breathe. How are they surviving that?

Nail guns and wood chippers of course feature in murder stories. There was a nail gun in a Bones episode. And the wood chipper is in Fargo as well as Bones. Want to talk about how the procedural-industrial complex treats women's bodies as objects and fodder for their machines? That's a mixed metaphor or three but so what. Also Bones tended to have gender parity for victims AND treated everyone like a person. I love Bones. 

If I were writing a Bones spec right now, I'd want to use that road paver. Imagine the terrible things it would do to a body for the geniuses at the Jeffersonian to figure out. But see the bones would have to be chopped up and mixed in with the asphalt, maybe using a cremation bone grinder. A challenge for Brennan and her team. It would make a great spec. 

Bones is always, always, always careful to humanize their victims and show grieving families and their current friends and relationships and so on. It's a good show to talk about in this context. Maybe I'll talk more about it in the future.

I keep coming back to Kaylee in Firefly, ship invader Jubal Early threatening her with rape, saying to her, "Ain't nothing but a body to me. And I can find all unseemly manner of use for it." Horrifying. "Objects in Space." Extremely good episode, though. One of the best.

The moral is don't treat people as objects, even when they're dead, OBVIOUSLY, stupid fishing guys in this story I hate. 

The wife is so astonished and horrified. But we know these guys, she thinks. Their kids are in school with our kids. And they could just do this. Just treat her that way. It's what you hear over and over about people who do horrible things to people. But he's a nice guy! Yeah, that's who does those things. Just other people. It's not some distant monster who does it. It's the guy next door. 

The moral is do the right thing or you're the monster. It's that easy. It's just a matter of doing the right thing or the wrong thing. There aren't actually good people and bad people, just people doing good things and bad things. Don't do the bad thing and excuse it by saying you're a good person so it must be okay. Maybe that's why I hate the story so much, because it comes down on that exact comforting exonerating copout at the end.

Really hate this story. Doesn't mean it's not good! Obviously it's a good one. But I still really hate it. Maybe I can record my episode tomorrow, inner rebellion and external cacophony allowing. 

Raymond Carver has another excellent story I hate called "Cathedral" about an utter asshole who gradually figures out how to stop being so prejudiced against a blind friend of his wife.

The thing is, I don't enjoy spending time with utter asshole characters. Tricky, huh?

Also: don't treat people like objects. 

Up next: Firefly in general and "Objects in Space" in particular.

14 Conjunctions, Consequences, Murderbot

In case anyone wondered whether I have ADHD, yes! This episode proves it, if there had ever been any doubt. Also I'd had five short nights of sleep in a row AND was having an asthma attack, which makes me panic and fear for my life what with how it can actually kill you. But no, I sat there quietly recording and then today edited out all the horrible wheezy inhalations.

Jeebus.

However! It's about great things! That terrible comma plus and construction that I hate so much! See this post for much more, in a much more articulate format.  

It's also about the Murderbot books. I ADORE Murderbot. Just writing that makes me want to go read them. So good! Murderbot!

It's mostly about connecting both grammatical thoughts and story ideas in a logical way that shows consequences, more so than just A + B + C. 

We need both, this is what I'm saying.

Take that nightmarishly awful but beautifully written novel I wrote about a while back. Gorgeous sentences that added up to nothing because the plot was atrocious and the character something you scraped off your shoe. 

We need to write well on all levels. Sentence level, character level, story level. All of it has to work.

I also get into that lovely duality of Murderbot, who thinks it's the worst (hence calling itself that) but will do anything to take care of its people, or even random strangers. Murderbot thinks it doesn't care about anyone but cares about everyone. I love that. I love it so much.

So enjoy!

The Geographic Cure is coming

Yeah, I got super bummed out by the short story collections, didn't I? And since nobody is gasping for them, I am working on the blog-to-book pipeline. 

Oh my giddy aunt. 

Problem one: It's ENORMOUS. I knew it was enormous but I didn't really know. Like it's 106K words and I'm about to start my first temp job, I think? That's like January to April of 2006. Just in a physical sense this is an unwieldy quantity of words that is difficult to divide up into logical volumes. I have to figure that out. 

Problem two: Actually problem two resolved itself. The problem was that it made me heartbroken to read about my excited hopeful trip to L.A. to become a tv writer, which you may have noticed I'm not and never have been, whoops. Well, I didn't know that then. I had hope! 

Hope in retrospect, oh no. Except, no, hope is the whole point of it. You have to have that excitement and hope and believe in the possibility of things and keep on getting up when you get knocked down. What are you going to do, just lie there in the dirt?

I always think I have been doing that, but no! I have not! I wrote a huge pile of books. I wrote a stack of short stories. I published things. I do all sorts of things constantly. Go go go! Work work work! 

Perception is a crazy thing, for real. 

Also if you're on the Titanic, it's going to sink no matter what you do, so you might as well have a good time. Just be aware of the lifeboat locations is all.

I'm editing as I go. Once I figure out how to make all the quotation marks curly instead of straight, and figure out how to break the thing into manageable volumes, I'll go ahead and put that out. I mean it's been out since 2006. But wouldn't it be nice to have a book in your hands? Or an ebook, where the entries are in the right order instead of backwards? I know!

Maybe year divisions are the way to go, come to think of it.

Anyway that's a good breakthrough in the retrospective sadness eradication department. It was so much fun being there. I was terrified and broke the whole time. But I kept on climbing mountains and doing bonkers jobs and going cool places and meeting amazing people. 

I just got accepted to the Bangor Authors' something or other in December. How cool is that? I already own a folding table. (They probably provide them.) I can have all these things out by then if I work like mad every hour of the day from now until then.

Seriously. 1.3 million words or whatever it was, that is just an unmanageable quantity of excitable prose. But it's delightful to read, truly, even if I say so myself. I mean I'm probably a harsher critic than anyone. At least I hope so.