Girl Detective

On a whim, I unearthed my Hellboy graphic novels: Seed of Destruction, Wake the Devil, The Chained Coffin, and Conqueror Worm. I was surprised to find that one of them, Conqueror Worm, I’d never actually read. They were all a lot of fun. Hellboy is a demon with a mysterious past who grew up to be the “World’s Greatest Paranormal Investigator.” He tracks down monsters, demons and their ilk. Creator Mike Mignola has a distinctive art style, oft imitated and perfectly suited to his pulp-y monster comics. The cast of characters is fascinating and keeps growing with the stories. Hellboy is for fans of old-time monster movies like Bride of Frankenstein, and newer works that are scary, sharp and funny.

As our family has muddled through SIX WEEKS of viruses, I’ve turned to the parenting tool of PBS kids tv many times. We’ve found several shows that the boys like and I either like too, or at least don’t mind.

Sesame Street: A classic. I can’t stand that elephant, and Zoe and her pet rock, Rocco, are pretty annoying, but other than that we all enjoy the show. I like seeing the celebrities and hearing Cookie monster sneaking in a big word of the day, like esoteric or lachrymose.

SuperWhy: I don’t much care for it, but 4yo Drake really loves it, and intereracts and practices his reading.

WordWorld: Both 2yo Guppy and Drake enjoy this, and really like the characters. Plus that Build-a-Word song is really catchy.

WordGirl: This vocabulary show is a bit above Drake’s head, but he likes the cartoon about the city-saving girl superhero, as do I–it reminds me of the dear, departed Tick cartoon.

Fetch with Ruff Ruffman: Again, I think some of this goes over Drake’s head, but the cartoon parts are quite funny, and the kid parts are interesting.

Have we ever watched all five shows in a day, for a whopping total of three hours of TV? Yup. We’ve all been sick, the weather’s been crap. This is yet another one of those humbling parental admissions. I’m sure at some point in the past I said superciliously, “I’d NEVER use TV as a babysitter. I’d never let my kids watch hours of TV at a time.” Well, once again, my “I Never” has come to pass, and I’ve been knocked down a peg. One of the many lessons I’ve learned in parenting: Those “I Nevers” come back to haunt me. Or rather, taunt me.

From TV guru Sepinwall, a video of one of my favorite bands that references one of my favorite television shows: Old 97’s sing “Dance with Me” while a Battlestar geek pursues Tricia Helfer.

Spoilers below, as I discuss who won and who didn’t.

I found a lot of drama in the finale. I was surprised and impressed to see Lisa show us the chef she could be–not only getting along with her sous chef, but psyched to work with a pro, doing things she’d done badly before, but doing them well, like the prawns, the soup and the dessert, and overall having a sense of calm, and finally deserved sense of self confidence. She almost won; I don’t think ANYONE saw that coming .

I cry foul that they were required to do dessert. Dessert should always be extra credit for a chef.

I felt terrible for Richard. He’s a much more talented chef than his meal showed, and I think he put too much time into being clever (e.g., the dish titles) and not enough into making just really good food. His comment that he choked impressed me with its integrity, as it did Ted Allen. He didn’t bluster, he didn’t get defensive, he spoke out honestly in a way that probably was to Stephanie’s advantage.

Stephanie won for her pork, and in spite of her dessert. But I think her meal and her win show what we’ve seen all along–she’s a calm, steady, skilled chef, who impressed quietly with small innovations like the pistachios that Ted couldn’t stop talking about, rather than with big ones like Richard’s nitrogen and smoker. That she only won the one quickfire was an index of this, too. As far as I can say without having tasted her food, she deserved the win, and I think it’s weird that so many in the blogosphere assume shenanigans behind the scenes in the judging.

So, to Stephanie: good luck and well done! I hope to visit Chicago and eat in your restaurant someday.

To Richard: you are an honorable person and a great chef. You had a bad night, but you will have many more great ones.

To Lisa: you finally showed some positive spirit and some consistent cooking. Keep moving in that direction, and good luck.

Fables is one of the consistently best comic books in any genre. A worthy successor to fantasy comic Sandman, by Neil Gaiman, Fables is the ongoing saga of fairytale characters in our “mundy” world, and their ongoing struggle against The Adversary, a powerful Fable intent on conquest. “The Good Prince” stars one of the series’s most sympathetic supporting characters, janitor Ambrose Flycatcher, better known as The Frog Prince. For years he subsisted in a barely conscious fugue in order to forget how he saw his family killed and home stolen by armies of The Adversary. As he returns to himself and faces the truth, he is presented with a quest, which he faces without flinching.

“The Good Prince” is a well-nigh perfect story. Strong characters, powerful story elements–villains, love, intrigue, chivalry, redemption–and beautiful art combine in a compelling whole. I had problems with the previous Fables graphic novel, 1001 Nights of Snowfall, I read, but not with this one, which I enjoyed tremendously.

Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath is my book group’s next selection. It is the Nobel- and Pulitzer-Prize winning epic novel of the Joads, a sharecropping family from Oklahoma. They’re evicted from their farm during the Dust Bowl and Great Depression. Like hundreds of thousands of others, they pack their belongings into an undependable vehicle, and set out for the promised land of California. As with the biblical story of the Israelites exodus from Egypt, the journey is far more difficult than the Joads hoped it would be.

Every strong novel redefines our conception of the genre’s dimensions and reorders our awareness of its possibilities. Like other products of rough-hewn American genius–Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and Alice Walker’s The Color Purple (three other “flawed” novels that also humanize America’s downtrodden by exposing social ills)–The Grapes of Wrath has a home-grown quality: part naturalistic epic, part jeremiad, part captivity narrative, part road novel, part transcendental gospel. –from the Introduction by Robert DeMott

Criticism of the novel tends to extremes. Some hail it as a masterpiece. Others called it didactic, sentimental and overblown. Critics complained of its flat characterizations.

I found it a powerful, moving novel that had a strong historic effect on injustice in its time. I agree with all the above criticisms, though. The novel alternates between “telling” chapters of analysis, and “showing” chapters of the Joad’s journey. This interrupts the main narrative, and I found obvious and repetitive. The Joads are sympathetic, but reductive characters. They are “noble savages“, and barely flawed or complex in any way. Tom, the son who returns at the start of the novel, meets a former preacher named Casy who joins the Joads. Tom and Casy can be seen respectively as analogs to Jesus and John the Baptist, or to Jesus and Doubting Thomas. In his effort to detail the hardships of the Joads, Steinbeck painfully detailed many of the degrading details of their new life. This leads to a greater understanding of the difficulties of the time, but was difficult to slog through over 619 pages. Chapter 16 is forty-three pages long, and concerned mainly with a broken rod in the car, and how a replacement is located and replaced. The novel ends with a deliberately provocative scene in which Rose of Sharon, who recently delivered a stillborn baby, offers her breast to a starving stranger. This heavy-handed scene conveys Steinbeck’s idealization of the poor’s willingness to share to survive, as well as his romanticization of mothers that pervaded through the book. (I believe there is a Biblical or saint myth about a woman nursing a man in prison, but I am still searching for the reference.)

A recent article by Jonathan Yardley in the Washington Post questioned whether the “earnest but artless” Steinbeck’s works are ones that speak more to younger readers than to older ones, and wonders at their enduring popularity. Had I read Grapes of Wrath when I was younger, I might have been less attuned to matters of craft, and perhaps not as sensitive to being preached to on matters of social and political justice. As a more experienced reader, I appreciated the well-meaning passion of the work, and the effect it had on society at the time. I can’t, however, recommend it as a masterpiece.

Added later: I still can’t find a religious reference for a woman breastfeeding a man in jail, though I remember seeing an old painting of this in an Italian chuch. But just a little research turned up many, many similarities between the gospel of Luke and Grapes of Wrath.

Well, our little family is either on our third virus in 5 weeks, or on the third version and second iteration of the virus we got at the beginning of May. Either way, we’ve been sick since then, and can’t seem to get enough rest to kick it. I’ll spare you the unpleasant details. Supplements and vitamins haven’t done doodly squat. I feel like we’re the Schleprock family, with a little raincloud following us about. I’m bitter, cranky (even more so than I usually am!) and hope this is the final round till virus season begins again in October.

Entertainment Weekly had their Summer TV preview last week. They name A & E’s Mad Men summer TV’s number 1 hidden gem. I really enjoyed the first season. The art direction and costumes are stunning and the complex characters are all disintegrating in various and fascinating ways.

EW recommends 10 other shows to check out this summer. I second their recommendations for Breaking Bad, Reaper, Friday Night Lights, and Bones. They’re uneven, but when they’re good they’re great.

I can’t comment on their cable choices: Flight of the Conchords, In Treatment and Brotherhood. We don’t get movie channels, and given how overloaded our Tivo drive is, I think that’s a good thing.

Finally, I know that Greek, The Paper and Gossip Girl are supposed to be enjoyable, but I can’t muster the energy for them. Either I’m burned out on teen shows (fare thee well, Veronica Mars) or my roster of B shows is full; see the above recommendations.

AFI has a special, 10 Top 10, on US tv next Tuesday, June 17, 2008, naming their top ten films in ten categories. Take a movie quiz (I’m a MOVIE MASTER, with 34 out of 40 correct) or try to pick the 10 winners in a contest. There are some tough questions, but some good ideas for stuff to see, though there were some headscratchers in there, too. Clash of the Titans for Best Fantasy? Really?

As part of a spy-themed night, Turner Classic Movies is showing Our Man in Havana tonight in the US at 10pm EST. It’s based on the novel by Graham Greene (the author of The Quiet American). It’s not available on DVD in the US, so this is a rare opportunity to see it. (Link from Laurel’s TV Picks.)

these awesome mugs from Penguin. At about 40 dollars US apiece for mug and shipping, I will have to admire them from across the ocean. (Link from The Kitchn)

Foreign Policy has a photo essay on the continued presence of American bombs in Laos. (Link from The Morning News.)

Joseph Epstein, at the Weekly Standard, is concerned about what he sees as a shift to a child-centered society (link from Art and Letters Daily):

Children have gone from background to foreground figures in domestic life, with more and more attention centered on them, their upbringing, their small accomplishments, their right relationship with parents and grandparents. For the past 30 years at least, we have been lavishing vast expense and anxiety on our children in ways that are unprecedented in American and in perhaps any other national life. Such has been the weight of all this concern about children that it has exercised a subtle but pervasive tyranny of its own. This is what I call Kindergarchy

Epstein argues that the centrality of children in a family does no favors to the parents, who become “indentured servants”, or the children, who become sheltered and need constant entertainment and gratification.

While there’s something of the “I walked to school ten miles in the driving snow when I was a kid,” about Epstein’s argument, I’ve been thinking a lot about this, since I stay home with my 2 and 4 year old sons. My house is dirty, my laundry piles up, and my yard is a weed mecca. This is because the boys are not only not helpful to the housekeeping, but actively detrimental. And out of guilt, or fatigue, I don’t always press my point. Yet why shouldn’t children facilitate and participate in the housekeeping? Cleaning, cooking, laundry and yardwork are good, honest work. And making a neat, orderly, presentable home is a fine ideal. They may seem less intellectual than a museum visit or a music class, but they provide ample opportunities for learning and exercise.

Added later: Mental Multivitamin wrote about the Kindergarchy piece, too.

I’ve heard the same thing over again by friends who saw Hellboy–it’s OK. Good not great. Yet Guillermo del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth made me want to check out his earlier movie for myself, since Hellboy II is out this summer. I’m glad I did. I think Hellboy may have been plagued by misplaced expectations. Hellboy is a monster movie. The villains are occult-obsessed Nazis (think Raiders of the Lost Ark). The antihero is a giant red demon who smokes, quips, and shaves his horns down. Oh, and he likes kittens. This is not a movie for deep analysis. This is a fun movie. A silly movie. The look is the thing, and it looks terrific. The characters are engaging and interesting, except perhaps for the newbie, observer character. The plot, such as it is, fizzles out at the end. But that’s compensated for by the cool effects of Selma Blair’s character’s pyrokineses.

In preparation for the dvd Apocalypse Now, which follows my recent reading on the Vietnam war, I sought out Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, booked with “The Secret Sharer”. I always find it weird to read a story I “know” but haven’t yet read. I had similar experiences with Dracula, Jane Eyre, and Frankenstein. The books were familiar in the famous details, but surprising in their complex wholes.

I was reminded of Henry James’ Turn of the Screw, which I read earlier this year. There is a detailed framing narrative, and much psychological detail about ugly aspects of human nature. HoD is narrated by Marlow, to a ship’s crew. Marlow was sent to Africa, where he encountered, mostly by hearsay, a man called Kurtz. The details of Kurtz’s behavior are deliberately vague, and thus more creepy. This also serves to put the characters’ psyches in sharper focus. The tale has many interpretations, among them the dichotomy between good and evil, or the characters as analogs to Freud’s concepts of id, ego and superego. What I noted, though, was Conrad’s penchant for emphasis by repetition. Marlow is described many times as a Buddha in the telling of his tale. I believe this implies an acceptance of all of human experience, not just the pleasant, socially accepted ones.

all that mysterious life of the wilderness that stirs in the forest, in the jungles, in the hearts of wild men. There’s no initiation either into such mysteries. He has to live in the midst of the incomprehensible, which is also detestable. And it has a fascination, too, that goes to work upon him. The fascination of the abomination–you know, imagine the growing regrets, the longing to escape, the powerless disgust, the surrender, the hate.

Heart of Darkness is a difficult read because of its racism, and its synonymous use of “dark” for “evil” and “primitive,” for example. But it’s a short tale worth reading for its examination of the nature of all people. “The Secret Sharer” is also worthwhile, a short story of a new skipper who takes on a stowaway wanted for murder. Through repetition and psychological details, the character of the skipper grows, both to himself and to the reader.

Added later: Heart of Darkness is in production as an opera. My favorite comment from a member of the test audience? “Too dark.”

My to-read list has suddenly gone kablooey. I have several recommendations from people I trust, plus Grapes of Wrath by Steinbeck to read for my book group. Those poor, neglected books on my shelf. They’re never going to get read.

World Made by Hand by James Kunstler and The Ten-Year Nap by Meg Wolitzer, recommended at Mental Multivitamin

Dispatches by Michael Herr, recommended by Carolyn and Kate because of my recent spate of Vietnam books. Carolyn also recommended A Rumor of War by Phil Caputo.

The Adoration of Jenna Fox by Mary Pearson, recommended by Dawn at Avenging Sybil

The Ghost Map by Steven Johnson, recommended by my bluegrass-babe, public-health friend RG

Grand Central Winter by Lee Stringer, recommended by my friend lxbean

Oscar and Lucinda recommended by SFP at Pages Turned

The Road by Cormac McCarthy, recommended by VT

The Fourth Bear by Jasper Fforde, recommended by Steph

Confessions of a Slacker Mom, recommended by Natasha of Maw Books, and Lazy Cow of Only Books All the Time

And these are just the recent recommendations. Sheesh!

This morning I scored a mother’s trifecta:

1. Uninterrupted night of sleep
2. Time to myself in the morning to read
3. Got to drink my coffee and eat my pastry while they were still hot

It was great, and I was grateful. Funny, the things I used to take for granted.

Last night at dinner:

Me: Drake, you didn’t eat your tater tots.

Drake: I DID! You gave me five. Now there are four. I ate ONE!

He’s on his way to algebra, as long as he can frame the problem with fried potatoes.

Justice League: The New Frontier is the direct-to-dvd adaptation of the DC Comics graphic novel collection of Darwyn Cooke’s excellent miniseries. Set at the dawn of comics’ Silver Age, the film visits each of the members of what would become the Justice League: Wonder Woman, Superman, Barry Allen (Flash), Martian Manhunter, Batman, and Hal Jordan (Green Lantern).

This is a standalone tale that introduces each main character so they are familiar to comic-book regulars, but also accessible to newcomers. This is not a movie for small children; it has several scenes of death and violence. The heroes come together when faced with the growing threat of something known only as The Center. As subtext, they also struggle to find themselves and their place in the postwar United States. There’s a good balance of humor and drama. The voice casting is excellent, particularly David Boreanaz as Hal Jordan. There’s also a well-done feature in the extras on the history of the Justice League and its characters. For older children, of all ages. (Heh.)

One element of the Three Bears story always bothered me–why were the bowls of porridge three different temperatures? Last week, during my umpteenth reading of some version, a few possibilities occurred to me.

Mother Bear’s porridge could be cold because she served herself first, and sat down to eat last. I find this the likeliest explanation, having experienced this scenario many times. Additionally, she could have been on a diet, and given herself a small portion compared to that of Papa Bear, whose large size would demand a large portion, which would take longer to cool. Perhaps the bears were very poor, and Mama Bear was sacrificing her own portion to feed her child and husband. In both the latter examples, Baby Bear would probably get the medium amount of porridge, which would then be cooler than Papa’s, and warmer than Mama’s.

I do wonder how my reading changes when this type of musing takes up part of my brain. Do the boys notice the difference between Mom being fully present reading a story, and Mom struggling to suss out the subtexts while still reading aloud?