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Futurama Finale Made Me A Happy Kind Of Sad


Futurama is gone. And I’m sad.

I didn’t watch it religiously, but I always liked. And I remember my friend McBride expounding upon how it was the best show on television, better even than it’s older sibling, The Simpsons. This was during its first incarnation and I was rather dismissive of this particular opinion, but I respect him a lot, so I did, consciously or not, start watching the reruns on Comedy Central.

And then it came back.

And I realize why it is better, at least for me. I don’t have a traditional family. I have a better half, good friends, and random extended family in my home and my life. My relationships, oddly, are much more like those in Futurama than the traditional, nuclear family of The Simpsons.

And the finale was so sweet. Leela and Fry spending a life together, just the two of them. And Leela saying that she wasn’t lonely once. I had to go hug my better half after that. And then following the finale up with the pilot episode, because they (Fry and Leela) were ready to do it all over again.

So. TIme to start watching all of Futurama again.

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Frederick Pohl Died


I am embarrassed to say I never this veteran of science fiction’s golden era. Another name familiar to those who haunted used bookstore shelves, running their fingers over row upon row of spines with names like Pohl and Saberhagen and Burroughs and Asimov and Lackey and dozens more…

Have to get off my tuckus and read his classic (so I hear) The Space Merchants.

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Happy Birthday, Edgar Rice Burroughs


As frequent readers of this blog (a set people consisting exclusively of relatives) will know, I love Edgar Rice Burroughs’ planetary romances. I need to get around to reading the fourth book of his Barsoom novels (Thuvia, Maid of Mars, for you completists out there). But I have never read, nor have I ever been much interested in his Tarzan stories. I remember, when we lived in Norfolk, Virginia, one of our rooms was designated as the library and on the shelves was a Tarzan novel. I think it was The Beasts of Tarzan, but don’t quote me on that. All I remember was a wonderfully lurid, pulpy cover featuring an alligator. My mother, while never actively discouraging from reading it (she never discouraged me from reading anything), did let me know that she felt the stories were racist. So I never read it, despite not infrequently pulling it down from the shelf and looking at its exciting cover. She also told me about Johnny Weismuller and the Tarzan movies, which were sometimes on television on Saturday afternoons.

So, anyway… here’s to you, Mr. Burroughs. Happy birthday.

Also, they showed Land That Time Forgot on tv today. Loved that movie as a kid. The source material? ERB, of course!

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Seamus Heaney Died


He was just seventy-four. He was due to read at the Folger Shakespeare Library in the spring and I was very much looking forward to it.

Not so long ago, I had some book money burning a hole in my pocket and I had some thoughts about what I might buy, but when I saw Heaney’s Field Work, that was what I knew I had to get. And when I lived in Atlanta, Chapter 11 books sold me a beautiful copy of his translation of Beowulf.

He wore the mantle of Yeats well. I’m not saying he was Yeats’ equal, because… who is? But as a mythologizer, elegist, and obliquely political poet, he carried on some of Yeats’ mission.

Anyway. This is just sad. Really sad.

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Weekend Reading – Smackdowns


Poetry slams do nothing for poetry.

A well rounded education is useless! You must submit to the almighty market!

Someone’s got a problem with Kevin Young.

Death is helping to keep the typewriter alive.

The Chomsky-Zizek death match.

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‘The Acceptance World,’ By Anthony Powell (New Year’s Resolution, Book Thirty-Three)


9780226677149The more I read, the more appreciate these novels. The third novel, The Acceptance World, like it’s predecessor, jumps several years ahead from the previous one. At this point, the characters we met as teenagers are approaching thirty.

The ‘Slump’ has occurred. No one ever mentions the crash of 1929, but that’s clearly what they’re talking about. People’s financial situations have declined. Marriages are falling apart. A lot of marriages. It seems to be a theme. The narrator picks up with the object of desire from the last book. Which I found reassuring.

The title comes from a particular kind of insurance or reinsurance vehicle used in trade at the time (and which maybe still is). But it is also acceptance of straitened circumstances. And of changing circumstances. Left wing radicals, first appearing in A Buyer’s Market (symbolizing, I now, know, the unlimited seeming potential that no longer exists in this book), are now fully fledged communists and much more socially acceptable.

But, it ends with the likelihood that the poor narrator’s lover will be returning to her philandering husband (whose finances also solidified a bit after, presumably, being hit hard by the crash).

The narrator writes and publishes his novel, but we really don’t learn anything about it. It’s not the novel written by ‘Marcel’ in Proust’s epic. That novel was the novel you, the reader, just completed. This one, by Powell’s narrator, I suspect is something more prosaic.

The ending seems to foreshadow more disappointments than the ones already accepted, with one of the narrator’s school chums declining in alcoholism, another into unhappiness, and the least likable one (Widmerpool) seeming to approach a position of too much power for a man who always seems oddly dangerous and certainly untrustworthy and irritatingly, materialistically pretentious (like an a–hole junior associate at a hedge fund). That said, previously, Jenkins, the narrator, had felt left behind by old school chums who went on to greater wealth and marriage. Now, many are finding themselves somewhat diminished and closer to Jenkins’ financial level and his failure to marry seems nearly genius.

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What It’s Like When My Better Half & I Watch ‘Game Of Thrones’


- Game Of Thrones Finale - PINK - Just Give Me A Reason Parody - YouTube

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‘Towers of Midnight,’ by Robert Jordan and Brandon Sanderson (New Year’s Resolution, Book Thirty-Two)


9780765364876We’re nearly at the end. The penultimate book of the Wheel of Time.

I have noted that Sanderson is a better writer than Jordan, but this book made me miss Jordan. The clunkiness of the language, after so many books, had become part of it. I miss his weird tics.

For example, Mat Cauthon has a sort of black staff with a blade on the end. Most of us might call it a spear or a halberd or a pole arm or (if we’re a real medieval geek) a glaive. But not Robert Jordan. He creates all sorts of permutations of ‘knive’ or ‘blade’ and ‘staff.’ At the time, it just seemed weird. you wanted to say, ‘a long piece of wood with a pointy knife on the end… you mean a spear?’ But now that Sanderson is using phrases like ‘pole arm,’ well, I just feel a little sad.

The page bloat continues (Towers of Midnight coming in at just over 1200 pages), but Sanderson does appear to be doing his best to wrap things up, moving everyone into place for the final battle.

The most exciting bit was a supernatural rescue mission featuring the most interesting character in the series, by far, Mat. Jordan had a tendency to forget about him, but Sanderson seems more inclined to the reader (at least, this reader) what he or she wants. An almost Dungeons &Dragons-ish dungeon crawl mystery in a creepy tower (one of the two midnight-y towers of the title; I’m assuming the other is the so-called Black Tower, where a lot of male magic wielding types hang out and train and, it also seems, plot terrible evil) was the big ending set piece. A character who was a big part of the story early but who has been missing for a while was rescued. Which is cool, but with an almost George R.R. Martin size cast, frankly, after having not seen her for something like 5-7 books, I was okay with not bringing her into the mix. Plus, I don’t feel like Sanderson got her quite right.

But anyway… I’ll be going back to Anthony Powell’s novels of Britain between the wars before finally finishing up the Wheel of Time. I might throw a party for myself when I do finish the series. Fourteen books. That’s ridiculous.

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Dump Him


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