Kushner/Benjamin/HemlockGrove

Today I read the next fifty pages of Rachel Kushner’s 2008 debut novel, Telex From Cuba. Kushner continues developing her detailed and richly nuanced portrait of Batista-era Cuba in at least two directions. Once plotline concerns French expatriate Christian de La Mazière, a former SS officer during World War 2, who came to Cuba after serving a prison sentence in France after the end of the war. He is beginning a liaison with Rachel K, a burlesque dancer in a Havana nightclub who also has a shady past. This part of the novel has all the exoticism one might expect of a novel set in the tropics, and for this reason is less interesting than the second thread of Kushner’s narrative: a portrayal of the American expatriate community, all of whom are connected to the United Fruit Company in one way or another (either as managers or workers) but who are otherwise very diverse in terms of their class backgrounds. The picture Kushner is developing of the dynamics of this colonial community is what I find most interesting about the novel at the moment.

I also read the next fifty pages of Medea Benjamin’s Drone Warfare: Killing By Remote Control. In this section of the book, Benjamin discusses the morality of drones, arguing that even in the context of the immorality of ‘standard’ wars, drones are especially immoral for the way in which they remove US citizens even further from the realities of war. This is in turn means that if the US and other governments are more likely to go to war when they don’t have to put boots on the ground, they are unlikely to meet with much push back from citizens who are not directly impacted by the conflict. After such a depressing (albeit accurate) conclusion, it comes as something of a relief to read Benjamin’s next chapter, which focuses on international acts of resistance against drones. Granted, the members of these small but committed groups may not have changed much at this point (as the comparison with the successful anti-landmines movement makes clear) but the simple fact that some people are taking a stand always means something.

I also watched episodes 5 and 6 of Hemlock Grove. If one doesn’t get too hung up on logic and embraces absurdity, this show can be a real hoot. I recently blogged about The Following and I know I harped on the lack of logic in that show, but the difference, as I mentioned before, is that Hemlock doesn’t take itself seriously, whereas The Following behaved as if everything it said was dreadfully portentous and meaningful, which showed up its utter lack of substance even more. Take, for example, the character of Dr. Johann Pryce in Hemlock. Played to camp perfection by Joel de la Fuente, Pryce is the evil scientist straight out of central casting, except for the fact that de la Fuente plays him as such a queen that he makes Vincent Prince look butch. When he tells Dr. Chasseur that he suffers from an excess of adrenaline that gives him “hysterical strength” I think I fell in love with this show not in spite of but because of its ridiculousness. And if that wasn’t enough, we also have Famke Janssen’s accent, which we find out in episode 5 is meant to be English, though you could have fooled me. Priceless!

Medawar/Benjamin/HouseonHauntedHill

Today I finished Mardi Oakley Medawar’s 1998 novel Death At Rainy Mountain. The tangent consisting of Tay-bodal’s brief stay with Union troops after he was shot proved to be just that: a tangent. The novel is not really about white-Indian contact as much as it is about exploring the complexities of Kiowa culture and society. These complexities are presented most fully in the novel’s climactic scene, in which Tay-bodal successfully exonerates the Cheyenne Robber and reveals the identity of the murderer. There are obvious connections between this scene and the revelation scene of, say, an Agatha Christie novel where the omniscient detective explains his deductions. The difference is that Medawar connects the solution to her mystery brilliantly to questions of status and power in Kiowa society that in a very real sense provided the motive for the crime. Fittingly, the novel concludes with Tay-bodal’s marriage to Crying Wind, not only providing a happy ending, but also signifying his journey from outsider at the start of the novel to fully integrated community member at novel’s end.

I also read the next fifty pages of Medea Benjamin’s Drone Warfare: Killing By Remote Control. When Benjamin discusses the human costs of drone attacks (which include not only deaths and woundings but also the psychological trauma that results from living in a constant state of fear) it’s heart-rending. But then I’m reminded of Richard Wright’s famous comment about Native Son, namely, that he wanted to write something so hard and deep that people would have to read it without “the consolation of tears.” I feel the same way about this section of Drone Warfare: anger, rather than tears, is the more appropriate and useful response. Benjamin then goes on to discuss the legal issues surrounding the use of drones. It’s not difficult to demonstrate that the US is violating international law but doing so is unavoidably based on two rather naïve assumptions: a) that there has ever been a time when the US has NOT violated international law, and b) that anyone will ever hold the US to account. I’m not saying that Benjamin assumes these things; it’s just that any discussion of the legality of US policy can’t help but seem beside the point.

I also watched William Castle’s 1959 horror classic, The House on Haunted Hill. Vincent Price, at his brilliantly campy best, stars as an eccentric millionaire who promises to pay a group of strangers $10,000 each if they spend the night in a haunted house. By the end of the film, we find out that this arrangement was a ploy by Price to draw out his wife and her lover, who were planning to murder Price. The resolution of the murder plot, however, is hardly the focus of the film. Instead, the film is almost entirely driven by the development and gradual ratcheting up of an atmosphere of paranoid suspense. The sub-par special effects (especially what appears to be a dancing skeleton) don’t help much in this respect, but Price and Elisa Cook, Jr. between them are strong enough to carry the film and its camp aspects turn out to be much effective and memorable than its ability to scare the audience. Supposedly, the enormous success of this film inspired Hitchcock to try his hand at a low-budget horror film, with Psycho being the result. If one compares the two films, however, one will see that they’re completely different, so maybe Castle’s work served only as a negative example to Hitch.

Medawar/Benjamin/HemlockGrove

Today I read the next fifty pages of Mardi Oakley Medawar’s 1998 novel Death At Rainy Mountain. The novel heads in a major new direction at this point when Tay-bodal is chased and attacked while investigating the murder. He must be getting closer to the truth (perhaps having something to do with White Otter’s former suitors?) but we have no way of knowing because Medawar’s focus at the moment is not on why Tay-bodal was shot, but instead on his rescue by Union soldiers. Medawar’s description of the interaction between Tay-bodal and the Union doctor and the interpreter Billy allows her to develop the theme of cross-cultural interaction between Indians and whites (and how fraught with difficulty it is) and also underlines the fact that the novel up to this point has taken place within an entirely Native American context. It’s not immediately clear why Medawar has chosen to introduce a white perspective into the novel at this point.

I also read the next fifty pages of Medea Benjamin’s Drone Warfare: Killing By Remote Control. In this section of the book, Benjamin concentrates on a number of different subjects: 1. The increasingly global spread of drone technology: more and more countries are producing drones and consequently drone technology is less and less under the control of the US. 2. Following on from #1, there is a growing potential for drone-related blowback against the US—non-state actors could easily adapt drone technology to attack targets within the US. Moreover, Benjamin emphasizes the extent to which the US is increasingly using drones domestically for surveillance purposes. (Although Benjamin does not do this, I must say that I really hate discussions of drones that state either explicitly or implicitly that the issue of drones is somehow ‘more serious’ when US citizens are targeted). 3. The situation of drone pilots, especially those located thousands of miles away in the US. On the one hand, they are so separated from what is happening that they might as well be playing video games (and the relationship between gamer culture and drones is a fascinating subject in its own right) but on the other hand they experience great amounts of stress from the fact that, unlike conventional pilots, they get to see very clearly the consequences of the strikes they order. I’m not going to lie: I’m sure that PTSD among drone pilots exists but I find it difficult to have any sympathy for them.

I also watched the next two episodes of Hemlock Grove. Shows of this kind have a sort of grace period that lasts for the first couple of episodes. During this time, they can pile up any number of assorted mysteries without even hinting at a resolution of any of them because this part of the series is all about generating the requisite atmosphere. After this point, however, the show has a problem. On the one hand, it has to start uncovering some of the mysteries and it has to do so quickly enough to hold the viewer’s interest (nothing worse than those episodes that just seem to tread water) and yet not so quickly that the mysteries are all used up by mid-season. One way to delay/complicate this process is by introducing a new character and in Hemlock Grove that character takes the form of Doctor Chasseur, the improbably mysterious National Fish and Wildlife Service agent who comes to investigate the second death. The other thing to note about this part of the show is that we’re starting to see a line drawn between a supernatural and a rational explanation for the events. Oh, and then there’s what the show does with its Gypsy characters. That’s best saved for the next post.

Medawar/Benjamin/HemlockGrove

Today I read the next fifty pages of Mardi Oakley Medawar’s 1998 novel Death At Rainy Mountain. In this section of the novel, the balance between the mystery and the other things Medawar wants to do is not maintained very well. Specifically, the mystery plot is not really advanced at all because instead Medawar focuses on Tay-bodal’s developing relationship with Crying Wind and the ways in which Tay-bodal is becoming more and more integrated into the community in relation to which he used to be an outsider. This is not necessarily a weakness in the novel because Medawar’s reader needs to have a detailed understanding of this society to appreciate what is at stake in the murder investigation and tracing the ways in which Tay-bodal moves from being an outsider to an insider is a very effective way of doing this. Not incidentally, it also means that these Native American characters are developed as fully three-dimensional human beings rather than as abstract types. Medawar’s use of humor is especially effective in developing these characters.

I also read the first fifty pages of Medea Benjamin’s important book Drone Warfare: Killing By Remote Control. I thought I knew a fair bit about drones before I began this book but Benjamin’s accessible, concise, and factual account is incredibly informative. She begins by drawing a sharp contrast between the official American line on drones (precision weapons that cause virtually zero civilian casualties) with the brutal truth of their use (indiscriminate carnage and a powerful recruiting tool for terrorists) but she then goes on to describe the details of the drone industry. For example, there are a huge variety of drones currently being manufactured (from the very small to the very large) and the companies involved make enormous profits, almost all of which are generated by US military contracts. One quickly realizes that issues concerning the accuracy and cost-effectiveness of these weapons are strictly secondary next to the continuation of a money-making enterprise that has reached both a critical mass and a self-replicating logic that will be hard to reverse. Next to the economic aspects of the drone industry, the deaths of civilians are considered unimportant by those who profit from their deaths.

I also watched the first two episodes of the Netflix original series Hemlock Grove, brought to you by director Eli Roth and novelist Brian McGreevy. To say there’s a lot going on in these first two episodes would be an understatement; they are basically a grab bag of just about every gothic horror trope one can think of, including dark family secrets, werewolves, gypsies, murder, a gothic mansion, suicide, sexually active high schoolers, one of who has apparently been impregnated by an angel, and a research facility whose work is shrouded in mystery but which is unlikely to contribute to the public good in any substantive way. As the closing words of episode 2 put it: “You have got to be fucking kidding me.” Indeed. Its one redeeming feature (and it’s a crucial one) is that no one in the show appears to take this nonsense too seriously. This is especially true of Famke Janssen, who seems to be having a wonderful time camping/vamping it up with the best of them.

Medawar/GreatRecession/HomeoftheBrave

Today I read the next fifty pages of Mardi Oakley Medawar’s 1998 novel Death At Rainy Mountain. Although Medawar’s detective figure, Tay-bodal, is initially presented as a marginal figure in his tribe and Nation, that soon changes as the murder investigation proceeds. Not only is he taken into White Bear’s clan, but he also falls in love with Crying Wind, one of White Bear’s cousins. This might initially seem to compromise Tay-bodal’s objectivity, but he doesn’t see it that way. Instead, it gives him an even greater incentive to prove that The Cheyenne Robber, whose clansman he now is, is innocent of the murder of which he is accused. In this way, Medawar is able to show just what is at stake in the solution of this murder case. The murder has shaken this complex society to its core because all of its constituent parts are so closely interconnected. In fact, Medawar makes a case for the way in which murder is an especially devastating crime for this Native American community precisely because it violates so many communal bonds in one fell swoop.

I also finished The Great Recession in Fiction, Film, and Television. In “Congress at the Kitchen Table: Religious Right Applications of Moral Home Economics to Federal Economic Policy,” Rebecca Barrett-Fox provides a fascinating analysis of the work of conservative Christian financial planner Dave Ramsey, emphasizing the ways in which his analyses blame victims of the Recession for their own poverty. Finally, Sarah Hamblin discusses Seth Tobocman’s graphic analysis of the Great Recession, Understanding the Crash, arguing that it represents a form of ‘graphic populism’ that enables progressive critiques of predatory capitalist practices.

I also watched Home of the Brave, a 2004 documentary by Paola di Florio that presents a moving account of the life and death of Viola Liuzzo, a white civil rights activist from Michigan who was murdered by Klansmen in Alabama in 1965. What I found most interesting about the film is the way that it begins as a standard eulogy for a civil rights martyr and then becomes something much more incoherent. Initially, it seems that the film can’t decide what it want to be: a testament to Viola Liuzzo’s courage, an exploration of the impact of her death on her family, a daughter’s attempt to reconnect with her mother’s memory before it’s too late, or an investigation into whether the FBI was involved in her murder. On some level, Home of the Brave is all of these things, without any thread predominating. Rather than incoherence, however, ultimately one realizes that this messy combination reflects the fact that the act of violence that is at the center of this film cannot be contained in one singular narrative. Like an explosion, its shock waves move outward with unpredictable force and consequences and this film does a powerful job of capturing that unpredictability.

Medawar/GreatRecession/Awesomest

Today I read the first fifty pages of Mardi Oakley Medawar’s 1998 novel Death at Rainy Mountain. Medawar is a novelist of Cherokee descent whose novels (usually written with some relation to the mystery genre) are set among the Kiowa and Crow tribes. Rainy Mountain is told from the perspective of Tay-bodal, for two reasons. First, Tay-bodal is an eccentric figure within the tribe and is therefore regarded as something of an outsider. Tay-bodal’s outsider status resonates with the marginality of the detective figure in much detective fiction, making such figures part of their culture and yet distant from it at the same time. Second, Tay-bodal is a healer, and as such evokes the image of the detective as the doctor of his or her society, tending to its wounds and bringing healing and restoration to a culture wounded by acts of violence.

I also read the next fifty pages of The Great Recession in Fiction, Film, and Television. In “Latino Liminality, Exclusion, and Erasure in Great Recession Television: The Case of Treme and Friday Night Lights,” Charli Valdez argues that despite the very real impact of the Great Recession on Latinos, recent US television drama has not responded to this impact by producing complex and nuanced portrayals of Latino characters. Jesseca Cornelson, in “Master, Servants, and the Effaced Middle Classes of Downton Abbey, The Dark Knight Rises, and Falling Skies,” argues that the Great Recession’s impact on social classes has been depicted in various ways in televisual bust culture, principally in the form of nostalgia for more traditional versions of class structure, or more progressive imaginings of reworked class identities. While this blog was on hiatus due to my recent hospitalization, I watched a lot of reality television, and was therefore particularly engaged by Daniel Mrozowski’s essay, “From Hoarders to Pickers: Salvage Aesthetics and Reality Television in The Great Recession.” I was very persuaded by his argument that reality shows about hoarding are attempts to “understand the specific pressures placed on the relationships between people and their possessions by the Great Recession.”

I confess that as I’m recuperating from my recent stay in hospital, I wanted to watch something that wouldn’t tax me too much. However, I clearly sold myself short in choosing The Legend of Awesomest Maximus, a 2011 National Lampoon movie that is a thoroughly awful and bizarre mash-up of Gladiator and 300. Both of these films provide much material for a good spoof, but Awesomest isn’t it. To call it college humor would be to insult the intelligence of even the most puerile college student and really its only interesting feature is to spot the D-list and/or fading celebrities in the cast, such as Kristanna Loken (the memorable terminator in Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines) and, saddest of all, Rip Torn, who deserves so much better than this.

TelexFromCuba/GreatRecession/RipperStreet

Today I read the first fifty pages of Rachel Kushner’s debut novel Telex From Cuba (2008), which is set in 1950s Cuba and tells the story of the country’s history from the perspective of a variety of American expatriates, all of whom are connected in some way with American business concerns in Cuba (for example, sugar cane and nickel mining) but who are otherwise very different in terms of their background and social class. In this opening section of the novel, Kushner chooses to tell different threads of her story through child narrators/protagonists, a canny choice that enables her to portray the classed, racialized, and gendered dimensions of American colonialism in Cuba with a lightness of touch and irony that would otherwise be difficult to achieve. In this way, her reader gets to appreciate the full range of the changes taking place in the Cuba of this period from something of a distance. Kushner thereby avoids didacticism while still conveying a sense of a society on the brink of a turbulent transition into independence.

I also read the next fifty pages of The Great Recession in Fiction, Film, and Television. In “Crash Fiction: American Literary Novels of the Global Financial Crisis,” Daniel Mattingly concludes that the literary fiction of the period that deals with the Great Recession focuses overwhelmingly on the fates of white middle-class men and eschews structural analyses of the financial system in favor of individualistic resolutions to financial problems and challenges. Sarah Domet, in “Mommy Porn, More or Less: Fifty Shades of Grey and Conservative Feminism in the New Economy,” discusses E.L. James’ blockbuster series of novels as a coded response to the newly prominent position of women in the workforce and the issues that prominence raises for women’s sense of self-identity. Finally, in “And They Lived Happily Ever After…or Not at All: (Un)Imagining African Americans in Recession-Era Popular Culture,” Maryann Erigha looks at how black characters have been a marginal presence, at best, in most Great Recession pop culture. When they do occupy a prominent place, Erigha argues, as in the films of Tyler Perry, they are given unrealistically feel good happy endings, endings that evade the real problems that African Americans actually face.

I also watched the fourth episode of Ripper Street. “The Good of This City” continues the show’s focus on respectable criminals. Even though the respectable citizens may not be the ones to fire the gun (they have lackeys to do the dirty work for them) they are usually the ones to give the orders. In some cases, they also exploit others more directly, but usually they choose their victims carefully in the sense that they target the most vulnerable. This dynamic indicates one of Ripper Street’s most fundamental targets, namely, the instrumental use of people by the powerful as if those people were expendable resources with no interiority or value of their own. Corruption in such a world is seemingly universal, with one important exception—Inspector Reid. The show’s image of the police as the incorruptible and idealistic defenders of all that is good and true is laughable in some ways but structurally indispensable to the coherence of the show.

BirdIsGone/GreatRecession/RipperStreet

Today I finished Stephen Graham Jones’ The Bird Is Gone: A Manifesto “There are ways. There are always ways.” Variants of these sentences occur multiple times throughout this book and they signify at least two things. First, they suggest that the Indian characters in this book are survivors, even tricksters; that they can always find a way past or through the difficulties that face them. Conversely, these sentences also suggest the opposite: that no matter how hard they try, the Indian characters cannot escape the fate that awaits them in a white world. Usually, though, it’s a combination of the two. Thus, although the crime novel dimension of this book apparently ends with the arrest of the ‘guilty’ parties, not only are the concepts of both guilt and innocence highly relativized by Jones, but also it’s not at all clear whether or not the forces of (white) law and order have arrested/captured the right people. If that is indeed the case, then who’s the butt of the joke? Jones leaves that for the reader to decide.

I also read the next fifty pages of The Great Recession in Fiction, Film, and Television. In “Real-to-Reel Recessionary Horrors in Drag Me To Hell and Contagion,” April Miller looks at how, in recent horror films, “the recessionary ‘monster’ has reinvigorated the genre by tackling the gender, class, and race divisions exposed by particular business practices at the heart of this current crisis,” while James D. Stone, in “Horror at the Homestead: The (Re)possession of American Property in Paranormal Activity and Paranormal Activity II,” argues that the Paranormal Activity films are “tales of the recession, not only because they stress our blithe disregard for the steady, inevitable advance of a monster, but also because they track the gradual collapse of consumer capitalist dreams.” Finally, in “’We are the walking dead’: Zombie Literature in Recession-Era America,” Lance Rubin shows how the novels World War Z (Max Brooks) and Zone One (Colson Whitehead), and the comic The Walking Dead (Robert Kirkland) all use zombies to “articulate the dread of financial dislocation, of being one pink slip or catastrophic illness away from joining the hordes of the unemployed, uninsured, foreclosed, or homeless, as well as the moral compromises one might make in order to survive.”

I also watched the third episode of Ripper Street. This episode, “The King Came Calling,” is a good example of how the series makes use of the Jack the Ripper context. The episode begins with what seems like an outbreak of cholera but further investigation proves it to be a case of mass poisoning, with the poisoner motivated (in part) by a desire to outdo the Ripper in terms of numbers of victims. What’s effective about this technique is that it suggests how the crimes of the Ripper might have resonated in Whitechapel in 1889 (in this instance, as a source of inspiration) without getting hung up on the question of the Ripper’s identity. My one quibble with how the show is developing is the way in which the character of Inspector Reid is becoming impossibly saintly and heroic. Unless he starts developing some serious character flaws soon, I shall grow quite tired of him! Unfortunately, I don’t think this is likely because of the way Ripper Street seems to idolize the police, but that’s an issue best left for another post.

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.

BirdIsGone/KarlMarx/Ripper Street

Today I read the first fifty pages of The Bird Is Gone: A Manifesto, a 2003 novel by Blackfeet Native American author Stephen Graham Jones. I mention his tribal affiliation up front because a lot of the critical response to Jones’ work in general and Bird in particular focuses on the ways in which he revises existing understandings of what ‘counts’ as Native American fiction. Partly because he writes experimental fiction, and partly because he works in popular genres including horror, science fiction, and crime fiction, Jones has been widely praised for his originality and the sui generis nature of his narrative voice. Bird exists somewhere in the territory between experimental and crime fiction. There is a crime (or crimes) to be solved but we don’t know much more than that. The victim(s), the suspect(s), the investigator(s), it’s hard to say that any of those standard figures of the genre exist in any stable sense and that’s entirely consistent with the speculative basis of Bird (the Dakotas are once again Indian territory and are now populated by millions of Indians) and its setting (a bowling alley named Fool’s Hip that is the gathering place for a collection of truly strange characters, many of whom rework fictional and pop cultural stereotypes of Indianness).

I also finished Jonathan Sperber's Karl Marx. In this closing section of the book, Sperber obviously spends most of the time discussing Marx’s final years, which were defined by a mixture of continued political activism, periods of increasing ill health, and the realization that the revolution he had spent so much of his life hoping and working for would not happen in his lifetime. The final section of the book is especially interesting for Sperber’s discussion of how Marx was turned into an icon, in at least three ways: as a practitioner of positivist social science (this emphasis was largely a product of Engels’ efforts at interpreting and publicizing Marx’s legacy), as a Jew (an element of Marx’s iconicity that I must say with embarrassment that I was completely unaware of), and as an intransigent and uncompromising revolutionary opponent of the existing social and political order. Sperber casts doubt on the accuracy/relevance of the first two parts of this characterization, while arguing that the third part gets quite close to describing the essence of who Marx was.

I also watched the first episode of Ripper Street, a BBC television series that debuted at the end of 2012. It’s set in the Whitechapel area of London in 1889, six months after the last Jack the Ripper murder. When another woman is found murdered, it seems that the Ripper has returned, but over the course of the episode Inspector Edmund Reid (Matthew Macfayden) disproves that theory. The sets in this show are absolutely extraordinary and recreate the world of late Victorian London with amazing depth and accuracy. The acting is uniformly strong and the show explores some interesting ideas, such as people’s investment in the idea of the Ripper coming back (an investment that is partly personal and partly professional), the kinds and extent of violence that can get overlooked because they’re not tied to the Ripper, and the exploitation of the weak by the powerful. All in all, a very promising start to what looks like a great series.

TheBlessingWay/KarlMarx/StarshipTroopers

Today I finished Tony Hillerman’s The Blessing Way. This closing section of the book solidifies the impression that McKee rather than Leaphorn is the novel’s protagonist. Although Leaphorn shows up just in time to technically save the day, it’s McKee that we stay with for most of the time. Order and rationality are restored by the end of the novel, a fact that marks The Blessing Way as a crime novel, but in this case with a different resonance, as the supernatural elements that dominated the first half of the book are all explained as a ruse to keep people away from a certain area—a plot device that unavoidably reminds me of an episode of Scooby Doo! In this regard, Hillerman seems to choose the white world of rationality rather than the Navajo world of the spirits. Ultimately, the thing that really sticks in my mind after finishing this novel is Hillerman’s gift at describing the desert landscape (which is very reminiscent of Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian). The landscape plays a huge role in this novel (both in terms of creating atmosphere and in terms of plot) and Hillerman spends a lot of time evoking it in all its sensuous detail.

I also read the next fifty pages of Jonathan Sperber's Karl Marx. In this section of the book Sperber finishes his discussion of Capital and then moves on to discuss Marx’s private life. Ultimately, Sperber’s efforts to deflate the tendency to present Marx as a prophet of the contemporary result in a rather muted and anticlimactic assessment of Capital that doesn’t really do it justice. I think Sperber is right to say that Marx’s version of political economy is influenced heavily by the mainstream economics of the first half of the 19^th century, and that consequently the influence of Capital, which took a long time to be felt because of the lack of an English translation, was impacted by many of its ideas becoming quickly outdated. And yet, to state an obvious point, Capital is still massively influential, a fact that Sperber seems to take for granted rather than explaining. The sudden shift from a discussion of Capital to the personal details of Marx’s private life is quite jarring and one feels as if one is suddenly reading a Marxist version of People magazine! Sperber’s emphasis here is that Marx was in many ways a perfect bourgeois, and that this should not be seen as a criticism of Marx, but rather as yet more evidence of the extent to which he was absolutely a product of his time.

I also watched StarshipTroopers, a 1997 action movie by Paul Verhoeven that is bizarrely controversial. On the surface, it’s a standard sci-fi blockbuster about a future Earth’s armed forces battling bugs on another planet, but over the years (and just like its source material, Robert Heinlein’s 1959 novel of the same name) it has been the focus of accusations that it uncritically celebrates militarism and is even fascistic. Verhoeven has defended the movie by arguing that it is a satire of fascism and militarism (which I think it is, albeit in a ham-fisted way) but the real puzzle for me is why this film has been singled out for this kind of criticism when you could easily apply the same critiques to dozens of other movies (and much more accurately, in many cases). Anyway, the digital effects are excellent, but the acting is for the most part excruciatingly bad. Caspar Van Dien and Denise Richards look (and act) like they’re made out of plastic rather than being real people. The honorable exception is Michael Ironside, with a wonderfully intense performance as a grizzled combat veteran. He’s the only character who looks like he has a life once the camera stops rolling.

TheBlessingWay/KarlMarx/TheMusicBox

Today I read the next fifty pages of Tony Hillerman’s The Blessing Way. Almost the whole of this section of the book focuses on McKee, perhaps reflecting the fact that he was originally the book’s main protagonist. McKee and Ellen Leon, Canfield’s assistant, try unsuccessfully to escape from the Navajo murderer and in the process McKee finds Canfield’s body. He knows now exactly how serious his situation is but still knows nothing about the Navajo’s motive. Leaphorn, meanwhile, thinks he has figured out why Luis Horseman was killed, but it still way behind in the sense that he doesn’t even know McKee is in danger. Technically, Leaphorn is Hillerman’s protagonist, but in this section seems unaware of the fact! Interestingly, Hillerman has the Navajo be very aware of the witch legends, though there is still some room for doubt about whether he’s using these legends as part of his cover or whether he’s actually a skinwalker.

I also read the next fifty pages of Jonathan Sperber's Karl Marx. In this “Legacy” section of the book, Sperber first discusses Marx’s complicated relationship with scientific positivism, emphasizing the extent to which Marx always tried to combine some elements of positivism with Hegelianism, which continued to influence him throughout his life. This combination can be seen especially clearly, Sperber argues, in Marx’s reaction to Darwin’s On the Origin of Species. Although he admired many aspects of this crucial work, he also criticized those who believed that positivism had essentially rendered Hegel’s ideas useless. Sperber then proceeds to the unenviable task of a discussion of Capital, a task that taxes his synthetic gifts to their limits. By focusing on such issues as how challenging it was for Marx to explain such phenomena as the tendency of the rate of profit to fall, as well as his surprisingly developed thoughts about the importance of agriculture to capitalism, Sperber finds a way to be selective without being dismissive—a considerable achievement.

I also watched The Music Box, a 1932 short film directed by James Parrott, produced by Hal Roach, and starring Laurel and Hardy. It’s probably my favorite film by them (with the possible exception of 1937’s Way Out West) and it won the first Oscar for Best Live Action Short Film (Comedy). The premise is simplicity itself: Stan and Ollie have to deliver a piano to a house at the top of a very long flight of steps. Various accidents follow in what is physical comedy at its finest. A lovely touch comes when they finally succeed in getting the piano to the top of the steps and then they are told by the local mail carrier that they could have used a side road that comes right up to the house. What do they do? Carry the piano all the way back down, load it on to the cart, and use the road, of course! I first saw this film when I was kid and I still howl with laughter when I watch it forty years later. Incidentally, the original steps can still be seen in the Silver Lake district of Los Angeles.