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Feb. 24th, 2012 11:45 amUnion I'm in decided not to strike at the last minute. I was half looking forward to experiencing one from within. Maybe the deal will still fall through.
On the silly show Fringe things are shaping up toward a war between parallel dimensions. Made me think how much better set up, more intriguing the show could have been if one had already conquered the other but next to no one had been told, and exposition instead revolved around some people finding out - with everyone in the world landscaping, scrubbing dirty mountains, purifying lakes, building five mile waterslides. With all time measured backwards, toward a termination date when the populations of the worlds would trade (without seeing one another to prevent friction), the conquerors moving into houses their doubles had been given subsistence wages to fit out with improvements of the conquerors' choosing - presented as mysterious lists - while the conquered are stuck with a much shabbier, environmentally degraded planet their masters had burned through. Allegorical of a few real things, like the global musical chairs game of bourgeoisification where the music is stopping soon, and of course the world today's adults are giving their grandchildren, maybe children.
And then I realized that's more or less what Never Let Me Go had already done. Back at South Carolina they made all the incoming freshpersons read it before their first classes started, during the year I was given my own first rhetoric/composition courses to teach (unions for public workers being illegal there). They told us we had to work the novel in somehow, but then later said it was optional so I threw the book aside, having enough to deal with, meaning my first experience of the story was unfortunately the movie, which made a big mistake.
I don't mean Keira Knightley though if I ever meet her I will unsexually assault her with a soup hose at once. And I don't mean how horribly unpleasant a viewing experience it is, given what's happening - the cramp-like, contortive inner wincing you start to do in sympathy for the maimed, which isn't all gone the next day. I mean how it screws up the sequence of revelations by making you feel you know what's going to be revealed - which at first you do, and then later you don't, and for the final one of all you don't even realize one's coming. Thinking you know what's going to happen can be a satisfaction only when you don't think everyone else knows too, that it's that obvious. And you probably need to feel there's at least a possibility that you're wrong. It wasn't the unpleasantness but being left to sink in it as a kind of narative lake that was the problem. The movement from weirdness to science fiction to an allegory (of globalism's discards, presumably?) to the final thing could have been supurb. And is that in the book for all I know, but inevitably ruined now. The final, existential-type shift was still supurb but you can't freshen a soured aesthetic experience. Novels can. Not easily, though, and possibly only novels.
Speaking of existential, caught a cold and my sleep's been fitful, probably enough to nail shut the coffin of my adjustment effort - meaning I'll start a new one.
On the silly show Fringe things are shaping up toward a war between parallel dimensions. Made me think how much better set up, more intriguing the show could have been if one had already conquered the other but next to no one had been told, and exposition instead revolved around some people finding out - with everyone in the world landscaping, scrubbing dirty mountains, purifying lakes, building five mile waterslides. With all time measured backwards, toward a termination date when the populations of the worlds would trade (without seeing one another to prevent friction), the conquerors moving into houses their doubles had been given subsistence wages to fit out with improvements of the conquerors' choosing - presented as mysterious lists - while the conquered are stuck with a much shabbier, environmentally degraded planet their masters had burned through. Allegorical of a few real things, like the global musical chairs game of bourgeoisification where the music is stopping soon, and of course the world today's adults are giving their grandchildren, maybe children.
And then I realized that's more or less what Never Let Me Go had already done. Back at South Carolina they made all the incoming freshpersons read it before their first classes started, during the year I was given my own first rhetoric/composition courses to teach (unions for public workers being illegal there). They told us we had to work the novel in somehow, but then later said it was optional so I threw the book aside, having enough to deal with, meaning my first experience of the story was unfortunately the movie, which made a big mistake.
I don't mean Keira Knightley though if I ever meet her I will unsexually assault her with a soup hose at once. And I don't mean how horribly unpleasant a viewing experience it is, given what's happening - the cramp-like, contortive inner wincing you start to do in sympathy for the maimed, which isn't all gone the next day. I mean how it screws up the sequence of revelations by making you feel you know what's going to be revealed - which at first you do, and then later you don't, and for the final one of all you don't even realize one's coming. Thinking you know what's going to happen can be a satisfaction only when you don't think everyone else knows too, that it's that obvious. And you probably need to feel there's at least a possibility that you're wrong. It wasn't the unpleasantness but being left to sink in it as a kind of narative lake that was the problem. The movement from weirdness to science fiction to an allegory (of globalism's discards, presumably?) to the final thing could have been supurb. And is that in the book for all I know, but inevitably ruined now. The final, existential-type shift was still supurb but you can't freshen a soured aesthetic experience. Novels can. Not easily, though, and possibly only novels.
Speaking of existential, caught a cold and my sleep's been fitful, probably enough to nail shut the coffin of my adjustment effort - meaning I'll start a new one.
