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wit
Wednesday, March 28, 2001
wit (HUMOUR) noun [U]
the ability to use words in a clever and humorous way She has an infectious smile and a ready/sharp wit. He is a born politician whose speeches crackle with a dry, biting wit. Her conversation sparkled with her own subtle blend of wit and charm. His caustic/cutting/savage (=cruelly clever) wit comes through strongly in his writing. A person who is skilled at using words in a clever and humorous way can be called a wit. Sydney Smith, a notable wit, once remarked that he never read a book before he reviewed it because it might prejudice his opinion of it.
---Cambridge International Dictionary of English, Cambridge Dictionaries Online.
No week should contain both Kindred and Wit. It's almost more than you can bear.
Say what you will about Emma Thompson -- she sometimes has a mannered style that doesn't work for many people -- but she is utterly phenomenal in HBO's Wit.
The script, based on a one-person play, is incredible. For this, as well, Emma Thompson deserves much credit; she adapted the source play, along with Mike Nichols, the director. Judging from this and Sense and Sensibility, she has something of a feel for literary adaptations. And this is quite literary. Vivian Dearing is an English professor, teaching John Donne to students, many of whom don't want to be there. She's brilliant, incisive, and periodically vicious and merciless to her students, to people who come to her for knowledge and receive instead complex symbolism and language, having no respect for them, not really seeing them as people.
Then she develops ovarian cancer, not discovered until a very advanced stage. And she's entered into an experimental protocol for extremely aggressive treatment. And she discovers what it's like to be the recipient of treatment by brilliant, incisive and generally merciless research physicians who don't respect her, who speak in complex symbolism and language. And, like her students, she learns what she must to understand what they're talking about.
The script is extremely deftly handled. After all, that sort of reversal of fortune is frequently handled with all the subtlety of the Anvil Chorus. And, to be sure, there are moments that are so incredibly obvious that they virtually scream at you.
So she tells you about them. Talks to you about them. The central conceit is that she talks to the viewer as if you were one of her students, as if this were one of her lectures. Life and death--her life and death--as a literary lecture. She points out to you the periodically inescapable irony and paradox ... then notes that it would generally have been too difficult for her students to grasp.
The story is aptly titled. It is an exercise in true wit, in all the senses noted above. By turns ready and sharp, dry, caustic and biting, aimed at her students and herself.
The sort of production that makes having HBO worthwhile.
As an aside, the HBO web site for Wit is very impressive in its own way. A quiet (thankfully, literally) and understated use of Flash, it has information on the cast and crew, as well as information about and poetry by John Donne. The author of the original play, Margaret Edson, writes about watching the transformation from one-person piece to multiperson film, worrying about how it would be changed, whether it would be left meaningfully intact.
The site itself is worth a look, even if you don't see the film.
@ 12:47 AM CST [Link]
say uncle
Tuesday, March 27, 2001
The more I see about what they're doing with this show, the more I wonder how on earth they managed to come up with it from this book. Was the author involved at all? I suspect not. I mean, the development meetings alone must have been fascinating .....
 - "Hey, I just ran across this book, this 'Say Uncle'. It's about this gay guy who gets custody of his sister's kid when they die in a traffic accident. They die when the brother-in-law gets distracted because his wife was giving him a blowjob in the car while he was driving, with the kid sleeping in the back seat. They die on Christmas Eve, makes for a happy holiday all around. Then when their will is read, and everyone finds out that they gave custody to the gay guy, at first he doesn't want the kid, then he does. Then there's a big court battle and everything. Might make a good four, six hour miniseries."
- "Well, we'd have to kill the blowjob, that's for damn sure. And the kid was in the car? what the hell was she thinking? That's a freakin' weird plot device ... Hey ... would it make a good regular series? We need a gay series now, a comedy, they're taking off everywhere. Look at that Will and Grace. Look at that Showtime thing, that Queer Folk."
- "Queer AS Folk."
- "Yeah, yeah, whatever. So what else has this thing got? Maybe we can make it fly."
- "Are you sure? I mean, CBS has the oldest audience of all the networks, except for Survivor, and our audience may not really feature this whole 'gay guy with kid' thing."
- "So maybe we'll stick it after Survivor, maybe make it a lead-in to CSI. So give with the details already. What else happens?"
- "Well, like I say, he gets custody of his sister's kid after this ugly court fight---"
- "Well, we gotta ax the court fight. You can't make a sitcom out of something that starts like that."
- "I don't know ... it works in the book, and it comes around again at the end---"
- "If it's a successful series, the end is going to be years away. Ax the court fight. What else?"
- "Well, so he raises this kid from a baby and---"
- "No no no. Gotta be older. Middle America ain't gonna feature no gay guy raising a baby. We'll get all the bible thumpers saying that he's going to make the kid gay. And there ought to be more than one. Get that whole sibling rivalry thing going."
- "Well, he raises the kid to adulthood, so that's probably not an issue. Although it is just the one."
- "No no no. Gotta have a sister. Get the whole brother-sister stuff going. Make the girl a little younger, maybe just going through puberty or some such. We can do the whole gay guy getting frantic at teaching a girl about the facts of life and all that."
- "Um ... yeah. Right."
- "So what's this guy do for a living?"
- "Well, he gets fired right off the bat because of the bad publicity from his court case--"
- "NO COURT CASE!"
- "Right. No court case ... so anyway, the kid is loaded, from his father, the guy's brother-in-law, and the uncle winds up being good at investing, and he turns the kid's money into this massive business empire, and that leads to another court fight at the end with the kid against the uncle---yeah, yeah, the end, no court case. I got it. Oh, there's this great scene where this dog they hate dies. It's sick, but funny, and it's wrapped into this big family wedding where the families hate each other."
- "We can't let the guy get fired, or live off the kid's money. They'd eat us alive. Make him something glamorous, but not typical. Maybe a pro athlete? ... Nah, they're never home. Wouldn't work. Maybe ... a local television reporter or maybe like one of those 60 Minutes guys. Maybe ... hey, maybe we can base him on that Steve Kmetko guy, the one that works for that E! cable net. He's gay, right?"
- "Um ... yeah, I think he's dating Greg Louganis."
- "We'll work on it. So ... what about this guy's sex life, the uncle in the book? He date or anything?"
- "Well, except for the very beginning, when he's a baby--yeah, yeah, no baby, I know--it's all done from the kid's viewpoint, but as far as we can tell ... no, he's pretty much a parental eunuch."
- "Good, good, good."
- "Good?"
- "Well, yeah. I mean, first, most kids don't think all that much about their parent's sex lives anyway. And second, that means we don't have to deal with the issue at all, and that'll make those people happy, the ones who don't mind the idea of gay parents except for the actively gay part. If GLAAD and them people get upset about us not showing a 'full, well rounded character', we can always just point 'em at the book and say that's where we got it from."
- "So, basically ... aside from the title and the concept that this guy winds up unexpectedly raising his sister's kids, we're not keeping anything else from the book."
- "Right. You got a problem with that?"
- "No, no. Just checking."
- "Maybe we'll keep the scene where the dog dies. Little sick humor, maybe that's just what we need."
And speaking of Queer as Folk, I would imagine that the little snippet at the end of that article tells everyone what happens to Dr Dave next year.
@ 01:21 PM CST [Link]
kindred
Monday, March 26, 2001
SciFi has put up an audio version of Octavia Butler's Kindred, a novel about time travel, about slavery, about the clash between modern and other sensibilities. Alfre Woodard plays Dana, the main character and Ruby Dee is the voice of the narrator, the woman for whose benefit everything takes place ... depending on how you look at things. It's essentially a radio play, although the presentation is somewhat simplified; the sound effects aren't always as developed as you would expect in something done for radio. At times, this is a positive mercy.
Even though it is historical (sort of), it is ... difficult to hear. Unexpected. Especially if it's been a year or two (or five) since you read the original novel.
The principal change is that the original story has been altered and updated to modern times. At times, if you're familiar with the original novel, the changes can jar a bit; for example, the lead character gets laid off of a business type that didn't even exist when the novel was first written. For the most part, however, the changes are handled unobtrusively enough that you they don't intrude.
Having listened to a couple of segments of this so far ... it is good. Very VERY good. Putting the novel into live voices, having people say things very naturally ... it gives the text a certain immediacy, a certain presence that a book can lack. That said ... reading a book can let you to distance yourself from text in ways that hearing words assault your ear doesn't allow. Parts of the story--listening to someone being whipped, listening to someone being threatened with rape, hearing the N-word tossed about with casual ease ... it is very hard to hear this story sometimes. It's worth the effort, but it is an effort.
(Note: this is a substantially revised version of a Grim Amusements entry)
@ 04:07 PM CST [Link]
you know, for kids?
Sunday, March 25, 2001
A Series of Unfortunate Events (HarperCollins/HarperChildrens):
 Book the First: A Bad Beginning
Hardcover, 176 Pages
August 1999
ISBN: 0064407667
trimsize: 5 X 7;
$8.95;$13.50(CAN) list
$6.27 from borders.com (link to title, above)
ages: 10-up; grades: 5 up
Book the Second: The Reptile Room
ISBN 0064407675
Hardcover;©1999;
trimsize: 5 X 7;
208 pages; $8.95;$13.50(CAN) list
$7.36 from borders.com
ages: 10-up; grades: 5 up
 Book the Third: The Wide Window
Hardcover, 224 Pages
February 2000
ISBN: 0064407683
trimsize: 5 X 7;
$8.95;$13.50(CAN) list
$6.27 from borders.com (link to title, above)
ages: 10-up; grades: 5 up
 Book the Fourth: The Miserable Mill
listed at borders.com as Trade Paperback, but it is actually Hardback
208 Pages
April 2000
ISBN: 0064407691
trimsize: 5 X 7;
$8.95;$13.50(CAN) list
$6.27 from borders.com (link to title, above)
ages: 10-up; grades: 5 up
 Book the Fifth: The Austere Academy
List Price: $8.95
amazon.com Price: $7.15
Reading level: Ages 9-12
Hardcover - 221 pages (August 2000)
Harpercollins Juvenile Books; ISBN: 0064408639 ; Dimensions (in inches): 0.89 x 7.27 x 5.23
 Book the Sixth: The Ersatz Elevator
Hardcover, 240 Pages, HarperCollins Children's Book Group, March 2001
ISBN: 0064408647
Borders.com price: $7.16
For summaries of the stories in the series, click on the individual book covers. All of the book sites linked have reasonably good summaries of the different stories, so I don't need to go into that here.
Overall, the series is really wonderful in many ways. It's quite well written, the characters are vivid and engaging, and the stories are relentlessly interesting; whether you're young or old, you'll be drawn into the tales of the Baudelaire children and all that they endure. Despite that, I do have a few problems with the series. I suspect that some of these problems are due to my age--although I think that I'd have had some of the same problems when I was the target audience's age.
One of the most persistent and annoying problems with the series as a whole is that Mr Poe, the banker responsible for the care of the Baudelaire children, is stupid. Repeatedly and boneheadedly stooopid. After two or three of these adventures, he MUST know that these children are in danger, and yet he repeatedly poo-poohs it, dismisses it, ignores the children when they say that something is happening--despite the fact that they've repeatedly been proven correct---and by doing all this places them back into danger. Now, this is a very adult perspective, but even in days of auld--perhaps especially in days of auld--you didn't become a high-level executive in a bank and display repeated stupidity, at least not that frequently and seriusly. Even leaving that aside, after a kid has been proven right repeatedly, most adults will at least pretend to pay attention to what they say.
Another, more serious, objection concerns the levels and type of violence aimed at the Baudelaire children. According to the author, the ultimate plan is to have 13 books in the series, and I honestly don't understand how he's going to manage it. By the end of those books, if things continue at their current pace, the children will have seen a truly staggering number of corpses (well, how many dead bodies have you seen? and relatives' funerals don't count), and watched several murders in the process of making those corpses. (They've seen at least three murders in front of their faces so far.)
The violence in the first book is, in many ways, the most difficult to read. There is a rather startling amount of actual physical abuse, and in one passage, one of the villains threatens a child with what almost scans as a sexual threat. Granted, this may be an adult perspective being brought to bear on a text intended for younger readers; they may read no such thing into it. But the difficulty with "The Bad Beginning" is that the violence aimed at the children is entirely too realistic and too intense and (given the rather odd situation) too easy to take at face value.
After that rough start, the books moderate into the sort of over-the-top gruesomeness that would actually appeal to its audience without scaring them (allowing, of course, for the astounding number of bodies strewn along the way), but at that point, you won't really understand what's going on unless you've read A Bad Beginning. (In a tribute to their odd structure, the later books can be read almost on their own, or out of sequence ... as long as you've read the first book to understand why these children are actually in this horribly untenable situation.
To be honest, it strikes me that "A Series of Unfortunate Events" is in some ways a set of books without a natural audience (although thankfully for the author, the audience it's found doesn't agree). I would never EVER recommend the first book for the target audience; I can't imagine that, if they read it through, most parents would want their ten year olds reading it. The teenagers who might actually appreciate it probably couldn't be convinced to read it, and most adults, who really would seem to be the proper audience, can't be bothered to read children's books.
All that said: if you're a grown-up, buy them. Read them. Despite the fact that they're children's books, they're well written enough that any adult will enjoy them. As for children ... use your best judgement.
@ 11:06 PM CST [Link]
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