couldreads

Some thinky thoughts on Duck Dynasty

[Editor’s note: Not a book post]

I’ve been a Duck Dynasty fan since the first season, when I would sing the show’s praises to anyone within earshot and foist recorded episodes onto unsuspecting visitors. And while my friends and family feigned a begrudging tolerance for the show — which is too improvised to be scripted and too staged to be reality — I could tell that they weren’t sold, not like I was. “It’s going to be big,” I’d mutter to myself as they shrugged off my over-eager descriptions of Si’s wisdom, or Duck Commander workroom tomfoolery. “Just you wait.”

And I was right. Having recently finished its fourth season, Duck Dynasty is huge. Eleven million viewers huge. Extremely comprehensive Walmart partnership huge. For the same intangible reasons that reality-show predecessors like Jersey Shore and Here Comes Honey Boo Boo captured a certain [ratings-boosting] je ne sais quoi, DD has easily become one of the most popular shows in the country. Which makes it super awkward for A&E that cast member/patriarch Phil Robertson – a crucial DD dispenser of old-timer Louisiana wisdom – made a series of offensive comments in an interview with GQ this week. The crucial excerpts are as such:

“‘Start with homosexual behavior and just morph out from there. Bestiality, sleeping around with this woman and that woman and that woman and those men.’ [Paraphrasing Corinthians] ‘Don’t be deceived. Neither the adulterers, the idolaters, the male prostitutes, the homosexual offenders, the greedy, the drunkards, the slanderers, the swindlers—they won’t inherit the kingdom of God. Don’t deceive yourself. It’s not right.’”
… “It seems like, to me, a vagina—as a man—would be more desirable than a man’s anus. That’s just me. I’m just thinking: There’s more there! She’s got more to offer. I mean, come on, dudes! You know what I’m saying? But hey, sin: It’s not logical, my man. It’s just not logical.”
… ”We never, ever judge someone on who’s going to heaven, hell. That’s the Almighty’s job. We just love ‘em, give ‘em the good news about Jesus—whether they’re homosexuals, drunks, terrorists. We let God sort ‘em out later, you see what I’m saying?”

Understandably, many people were offended. Many. A&E on Wednesday suspended Phil from the show “indefinitely,” which is a natural knee-jerk reaction, but also kind of like suspending Santa from the North Pole. Whether or not Phil commands the majority of screen time on DD, he is an important element of the family dynamic that makes the show so popular (I don’t buy into arguments that the aforementioned je ne sais quoi is the Robertsons’ read-between-the-lines Christian evangelism). Suspending Phil is like Jersey Shore suspending Snooki, or Honey Boo Boo exiling Mama June. However valid the reasoning, it don’t make no sense.

Shockingly, that kid from The Shining didn’t grow up to be totally normal

As superhuman abilities go, mind-reading has to be one of the worst. I mean yes, it’d be nice to call people on their bullshit, and the bar-trick possibilities are endless, but for the most part humans are vile creatures, and our thoughts the headquarters of depravity. Add to that telepathic stew an alcoholic and occasionally abusive father, plus a haunted hotel bent on your family’s destruction, and it’s no wonder that Danny Torrance, the child clairvoyant at the center of Stephen King’s The Shining, grew up to be Dan Torrance, an alcoholic and immoral drifter who drinks to dull the memories and manifestations of his own power.

Releasing a fiction sequel more than thirty years after its predecessor is the kind of gambit only Stephen King can pull off (though credit is due to the movie adaptation he’s so consistently talked down) and King, fortunately, seems to recognize the absurdity of trying to pick up where we left off, literally in ashes (in the book, the hotel blows up). And So Doctor Sleep is cast forward — through Danny’s troubled teenage years and his struggle to forget the Overlook (uh, YEAH), and into the present, where Obama is president, the Internet exists, and an adolescent boy band called ‘Round Here is at peak popularity. Even Twitter gets a mention.

In the present, Dan has learned – mostly through drinking – to temper his visions, and wanders from town to town doing odd jobs until some drunken episode forces him to pack up and move on. It’s only after settling down and getting sober that he is forced to face his shining head-on, and in so doing stumbles across a young girl in need of his help.

When planning to sail around the world, don’t

Exciting developments on Sorry Television! After three years (!!!) of fighting the good fight solo, I’ve invited some friends to submit guest posts, so that you fine people have something to read on those weeks when I get so ~~distracted by reality television~~ caught up in work that I run out of time to write reviews and/or finish books. Today’s guest post comes from John Peabody, and it’s about boats. (If you knew John, you’d understand why I expected nothing less.) Also there is a person in this book named Captain Richard Box. ….Captain. Dick. Box. Enjoy!

The ocean covers 140 million square miles, 70 percent of the Earth and is made up of about 352 quintillion (352,670,000,000,000,000,000) gallons of water. In 1968, Donald Crowhurst, a businessman and amateur sailor loaded with a heavy dose of British can-do spirit and an oversize ego, set out to take this on by himself. He wanted to be the first person to sail solo around the world without stopping. Spoiler alert: He didn’t make it.

Long before the invention of GPS. or modern safety equipment, Crowhurst joined the Golden Globe Race (not, unfortunately, a footrace among persons vying for Golden Globes.) The first of it’s kind, the race entailed master sailors leaving from England and making it back in roughly 220 days, if at all. Success would mean a lot of time alone at sea and failure meant probably dying there (or I suppose some kind of 60’s-era Cast Away situation).

Crowhurst’s story is masterfully told in The Strange Last Voyage of Donald Crowhurst, a work that inspired multiple plays and the documentary Deep Ocean. Rumors of a feature film starring Colin Firth and Kate Winslet are now circulating online.

While under-qualified for his journey, Crowhurst was seriously committed — stubbornly so. Even while construction of his boat the Teignmouth Electron (fantastic name) went over budget, missed deadlines and revealed unsafe design flaws, he only grew more passionate about his trip. Only for a moment did Crowhurst consider not leaving his wife and family behind (this, btw, is a conversation I like imagining).

Get your shine on

Here’s the thing: I read at night. I mean, not only at night – also on the train, and on weekend mornings, during commercials, and during superfluous portions of TV shows (read: all of X Factor). But I do a lot of reading at night, in bed, acting as a human Berlin Wall between my cats and further damaging my grandma eyes with the light of a propped-up iPad mini. (I actually have a book holder/travel pillow that, for the record, is dope.) I like to read in the (extremely relative) quiet of Bushwick-After-Dark, when the 18-wheelers stop rolling by for long enough that you might catch the sound of a bump in the night.

Which is all to say that The Shining is most definitely not a night book.

Everyone and their mother has been pointing me to Doctor Sleep, Stephen King’s long-awaited sequel to The Shining, which came out in 1977. But it irks me to read sequels without reading their predecessors, and so even though I’ve seen Stanley Kubrick’s famous Shining film adaptation about 65 times, I wanted to check out the original material.

The Circle is a dystopian brain fart

About a quarter of the way into Dave Eggers’ new novel, Mae is summoned to the office of her immediate superior at The Circle. Mae’s presence has been requested at the behest of Alistair, a developer from another department who is peeved that Mae — after being sent three notices — failed to RSVP for or attend his brunch for staffers interested in Portugal. Her “non-participation,” a mortal sin in the world of The Circle, is grounds for a passive-aggressive tongue lashing from her boss, plus a note on record with HR. When it comes to “engagement,” The Circle don’t play.

As an Eggers fan and closet Luddite, the concept of The Circle appealed to me. The novel is set at a large tech company, whose efficient and superior services have come to dominate the Internet slash world. Mae, a 20-something desperate to escape her job at a local utility, is hired by The Circle on the recommendation of her friend Annie, who is a high-level executive there. Through Mae’s nascent and later significant experiences as a Circle employee, Eggers’ latest chronicles the company itself, a business darling whose thinly veiled aspirations of world domination are excused by its image as a benevolent superpower, intent on making the planet a better place. And while The Circle’s true motives are something of a narrative foil, they also – in the grand scheme of things – don’t entirely matter: Good intentions or bad, is there a point at which the price of omniscience is too high?