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The May update at SFSite is up. Check it out. (This is one of the finest general-SF websites in existence.)
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The PBS show American Masters just did a documentary on one of my personal heroes, dancer-actor-director-choreographer Gene Kelly. Any discussion of American dance in the 20th century must include Gene Kelly, whose athletic style formed a perfect counterpoint to the graceful moves of the other giant of his time, Fred Astaire. Kelly was involved in many fine, fine films, and Singin’ In The Rain is generally considered to be the greatest of all American musicals. Gene Kelly is one of the few celebrities whose passing I truly mourned.
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Some researchers are casting more doubt upon the Big Bang theory, in favor of a kind of cyclical universe not unlike that envisioned by some Eastern cosmologies. Read the MSN article here.
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I have added a new permanent link to lileks.com, a fun site that is an interesting grab-bag of pop culture musings. The Daily Bleats there are particularly fun reading.
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I finished Dean Koontz’s novel Watchers yesterday. This is the first Koontz novel I’ve read, and he seems to have a definite grasp on how to manipulate emotions in the reader so as to heighten the suspense. His characters are well-drawn; the central two — Travis and Nora — are people we care about, and thus as they move into situations of increasing danger our involvement in the story grows.
The plot could be described, very loosely, as “ET: The Extra-Terrestrial meets The X-Files“. It is not purely a horror novel, nor is it science fiction; it is really an interstitial work that contains elements of both. While hiking in the woods, Travis encounters a golden retriever that seems to be fleeing….something. Travis helps the dog (and the dog helps Travis, a reciprocity that really fuels the novel) and the two escape whatever is in the woods. The book is really a series of escapes and pursuits, with Travis and the dog rescuing Nora from a sexual assailant, all three fleeing the something in the woods, the something in the woods fleeing the NSA agents assigned to find it, and everyone being unaware of the psychotic hit-man who is tracking everyone. Add to all this government labs that are dabbling in things they shouldn’t, peripheral Mafia involvement, and even a dash of Soviet intrigue (apparently the book is set pre-1989), and you have quite the potboiler.
The book’s main flaws are that the love story between Travis and Nora take over, relegating a lot of the interesting side action to secondary importance. Also, the book’s ending comes as a bit of a let-down; the confrontation that one expects between all of the story’s participants is over surprisingly quickly (and, quite frankly, I expected matters to be settled rather differently — one shouldn’t put down a book like this and immediately say to oneself, “It should have ended this way….”). These faults aside, Watchers is an impressive page-turner.
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IMAGE OF THE WEEK
Noblemen and their servants playing chess — Miniature, Al Andalus, 13th century.
I don’t have any information about this image other than the title. I selected it because it reminded me of one of my favorite books, The Lions of Al-Rassan by the brilliant Canadian fantasist Guy Gavriel Kay. (See the permanent link at left for more on Kay.) The book is set in a fantasy realm based on medieval Espana during the period when the Moors were pushed out of their main European stronghold, and it is a magnificent and heartbreaking novel.
When the Lion at his pleasure comes
To the watering place to drink, ah see!
See the lesser beasts of Al-Rassan
Scatter like blown leaves in autumn,
Like air-borne seedlings in the spring,
Like grey clouds that part to let the first star
Of the god shine down upon the earth.
-Guy Gavriel Kay, The Lions of Al-Rassan
(The picture links to a site of historical artworks.)
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Political books II: Jeff Greenfield’s Oh Waiter! One Order of Crow! is a highly entertaining read about a political event that seems so incredibly distant now: the disputed election of 2000. I actually read this book last fall, immediately after the attacks — a bit of timing that made the book’s subject matter seem shallower, less consequential, than perhaps it should. Greenfield’s book is a description of how all of our election day systems came crashing to a halt on November 7, 2000 — the media included. I remember sitting up until three o’clock that morning, watching Tim Russert scrawling electoral scenarios on a greaseboard; I remember all the machinations in Florida with all the hypocrisy on both sides; and most of all I remember a dull fall campaign that year between (as Greenfield puts it) “a candidate who spoke English to us as if it were our second language and a candidate who spoke English as if it were his second language.” Political junkies should definitely read this one.
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I just finished reading Joe Klein’s book The Natural: The Misunderstood Presidency of Bill Clinton. The book is billed as an important work of political history, being the primary chronicle of Clinton’s eight years in the White House, but in reality it is neither. It is a slight volume — barely 220 pages of primary material — and many topics are glossed over. The book is really an expansion of several magazine articles Klein wrote (primarily for The New Yorker) about the Clinton Administration, and it reads as such — not a whole lot of corroboration, little rigorous journalism, a lot of breezy narrative. Still, the book serves a purpose well: it at least provides the outlines, in broad strokes, of the 42nd President. Klein’s take is that Clinton is a man of extraordinary gifts and talents who, while accomplishing a great deal, never was able to really mold his achievements into greatness and who allowed his own personal failings to nearly derail him completely. Klein tells us a lot about the President, but ultimately the book still leaves Clinton as a somewhat foggy figure. A criticism that dogged Clinton from the time he entered the 1992 Presidential campaign is that one never could be sure just what he really believed, and after reading Klein’s book that charge still stands as fairly accurate. (Particularly frightening is the fact Klein cites that the Clinton Administration spent more on polling than every previous administration combined. Many conservatives used to complain that Clinton governed by the public opinion poll, a charge that was not entirely without merit.) Those interested in the political history of the 1990s will find a good starting point here; but the truly definitive work on that decade is still in the offing.