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.