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Men are from Earth, women are from Earth

It’s only through sheer fortuitous timing that the week I read a book on feminism, Seth MacFarlane goes on national television to offend a zillion people with uninspired jokes about actresses’ boobs. And since I’ve been presented with such a timely opportunity to discuss gender as it’s portrayed in modern society, let’s conduct a bit of a thought exercise—looking at Seth MacFarlane’s Oscar performance through the lens of Caitlin Moran’s How to Be a Woman.

Throughout her book’s 300-odd pages, Moran eschews characterizations of feminism that rely on lofty terminology or soul-searching investigations of social mores. Her own definition on the subject essentially boils down to two key tenets: 1) An environment of equality is one in which, quite simply, “everyone is being polite to each other” and 2) When one is unsure whether or not they’ve been presented with a bit of sexism—or, as Moran sometimes puts it, a bit of “total fucking bullshit”—one must simply ask oneself: “Are the men doing it?”

The Land After Time

I imagine that the way you feel after reading The Age of Miracles says something about the kind of person you are, in a glass half-empty/half-full kind of way. It’s that kind of book.

At some point in the not-so-distant future, the Earth’s rotation begins to slow. The days and nights grow longer; clocks become irrelevant. Scientists can’t explain it; they only know that “the slowing” is happening quickly — once 24 hours, a single day expands to 26, then 29, then 35. The government steps in and everyone is instructed to live on clock time; school starts at 9 a.m. again, whether it’s blue sky and sunshine or black sky and stars. Daily life, for so long in sync with the rhythms of the planet, becomes unmoored from them. And as the days and nights grow longer, people can’t help but wonder: How long will it take before the slowing — or the myriad weather and atmospheric phenomena it enables — becomes the stopping? Continue reading “The Land After Time”

Who watches the people watching the people watching the Watchmen?

Me: I’ve started Watchmen, and it’s great.
Friend: The movie was so. very. desperate. I felt a little molested when I left. Granted, I watched it in IMAX, so the 3-story blue schlong was part of it.
Friend: Literally, it was a dick three stories tall.

I think we can all agree that there was absolutely no other way to begin this review.

Finishing Watchmen is a small victory in my quest to keep a mildly ambitious list of 2013 reading resolutions, which also include spending a little time with biographies, poetry and historical nonfiction. (Let’s all pause for a moment to be collectively not surprised that I started with the graphic novel.) Watchmen is also arguably the most famous graphic novel of all time, an accolade I’m basing on the fact that it was recommended to me by no fewer than three people, and has a substantial number of glowing blurbs on its back cover. If I was going to read a graphic novel, this seemed the obvious place to start.

At the risk of provoking a nerd outcry (and in the interest of explaining the novel to those who haven’t read it) Watchmen is sort of like a really dark The Incredibles. It takes place in a fictional 1985, eight years after the Keene Act outlawed “costumed adventuring” by vigilantes not in the employ of the U.S. government. The novel opens with the death of the Comedian, a former member of both the Minutemen (a 1940s group of masked avengers) and the Crimebusters (the Minutemen’s much more horribly named successors). The Comedian’s death, a probable homicide, leads us to Rorschach (another former Crimebuster, and our protagonist of sorts), who is convinced that someone is purposefully killing masks. The rest of the novel is a whodunit for this mysterious killer, as well as a biography-slash-memoir of the masked avengers, and a fairly timeless commentary on the ills of society and the threat of nuclear destruction (despite being fictional, this 1985 still includes a Soviet war in Afghanistan). Although it isn’t particularly hard to follow, it would be fair to say that Watchmen has a lot going on.

Zombies, so hot right now

After spending most of this weekend slogging through another 4% in Les Miserables (I swear that I’m actually enjoying it, just sort of the way you’d enjoy doing “laps” in one of those infinity pools), I decided to take a breather last night and knock out a book I’ve been meaning to investigate since trailers for its movie adaptation starting popping up on my radar—Isaac Marion’s Warm Bodies.

As the movie previews suggest, Warm Bodies has a simple premise: Zombie “R” spends his days meandering around an airport with his fellow undead—including best friend “M”—but during a routine search for food he stumbles across Julie, a human who we later discover just so happens to be the daughter of the military general in charge of preserving whatever semblance of humanity is left. R doesn’t fall in love with Julie so much as feel something, which, when you’re dead, is enough to provoke a bit of curiosity. Over the course of the novel, R and Julie become friends, and through said friendship (plus all to-be-expected romancing) R finds himself becoming more and more human, a development that not only spells good things for the prospect of Julie not committing necrophilia, but also for the fate of those millions upon millions of other zombies in this post-apocalyptic world. After all, if one can start feeling again, couldn’t they all?

Cashing in on catastrophe

Hey guys, remember when I acted like I was going to bust out my laptop on vacation and write witty and insightful blog posts? Well, hahahahaha. That was rich.

So before I left for a week of basking in the partially cloudy New Jersey beach weather, I had a chat with a friend of mine about this Reuters video investigating the very important issue of our national obsession with Here Comes Honey Boo Boo. Said friend, a fellow news man (I am not a news man per se, but doesn’t that make our exchange sound extra intellectual?) noted that it’s far easier to get people engaged with a video about a redneck six-year-old than, say, one about the LIBOR scandal. “So true,” I responded, while remotely setting my DVR to record a marathon of old Gossip Girl episodes in my absence. “So very true.”

I have tried, through posts like this glowing review of Matt Taibbi’s Griftopia, to impress upon you people (and by proxy, people in general) the degree to which we as a culture should be engaged with financial news. Not simply because it matters, and is important, and determines the economic well-being of our entire planet, but because, well, it’s interesting!