BirdIsGone/GreatRecession/RipperStreet

Today I read the next fifty pages of The Bird Is Gone: A Manifesto. One part of this section of the novel takes place in Fool’s Hip, the bowling alley that featured so prominently in the opening section (in a subplot that appears to be told from the perspective of an undercover operative investigating the death of a federal agent), but it’s pretty clear that Jones is not going to limit himself to that setting, or to a particular time period either. Consequently, another part of this section goes back to the mid-nineteenth century and we hear of the wanderings of a small group of Indians who are subjected to all manner of hardships that gradually whittle away their numbers. There’s a similar emphasis on decline in the third and final part of this section, which appears to tell the story of the decline of the buffalo through a focus on a rifle that, once introduced into the culture, cannot be removed. This gives the destruction that results from the introduction of the rifle a feeling of inevitability.

I also read the first fifty pages of The Great Recession of Fiction, Film, and Television: Twenty-First-Century Bust Culture, a collection of essays edited by Kirk Boyle and Daniel Mrozowski that focuses on how various forms of popular culture have interpreted/responded to the financial crisis of 2008 and its aftermath. In their introduction, “Creative Documentation of Creative Destruction,” Boyle and Mrozowski explain that the focus of the collection is “Bust Culture,” which they define as “post-crash mass cultural artifacts inflected by diminishment, influenced by scarcity, and infused with anxiety.” The majority of the Introduction then discusses how the documentary form has represented the Great Recession, focusing in particular on this form’s representation of the simultaneous simplicity and complexity of the financial disaster. In his essay “The Imagination of Economic Disaster: Eco-Catatstrophe Films of the Great Recession” Kirk Boyle looks at how three disaster films (The Day the Earth Stood Still, Knowing, and Take Shelter) “operate as latent expressions of the latest crisis in the capitalist world-economy” through the lens of enviromental catastrophe. Boyle concludes that these films are politically ambivalent at best in the sense that they tend to naturalize capitalist disaster and its consequences.

I also watched the second episode of Ripper Street, ‘In My Protection.’ I would say that the biggest challenge facing this series, especially after a first episode that focused on Jack the Ripper, is developing storylines that do not feature the Ripper while at the same time maintaining viewer interest. For after all, it is not only the groups portrayed in the first episode that want the Ripper to return—many of this show’s viewers do, too. With that in mind, this second episode is testament to the strength of the show as a whole in its ability to develop the main characters, give the episode a satisfying villain, and to continue to build upon the previous episode’s portrayal of the underside of Victorian society, all without relying on the Ripper. It just goes to show that if the acting is strong enough, even a show like Ripper Street need not be dependent upon the Ripper.