Holiday break's consumption of texts

I started the break with, as usual, high expectations of rigorous study and viewing. Here's my review--not nearly as rigorous as I'd hoped (as usual) but not too bad:

I read MacNeil and Cran's companion book to their amazing PBS series, Do you Speak American. Overall a very reasonable accounting of the English language. I was again hit by the complexity and vibrancy of the English language and by how much people futily attempt to "sure up" the boundaries. The key false assumption which promotes this futility is that language reflects morality as witnessed in the post WWI "Good English Makes Good Americans" campaign which issued this "Pledge for Children":

"I love the United States of America. I love my country's flag. I love my country's language. I promise:

1. That I will not dishonor my country's speech by leaving off the last syllable of words.

2. That I will say a good American 'yes' and 'no' in place of an Indian grunt 'um-hum' and 'nup-um' or a foreign 'ya,' or 'yeh' and 'nope.'"

There are two more points to the pledge but I will stop there--what a delicious irony that the very phrases (ya, nope) which now convey the essence of blue-collardness and casualness, easily spoken by the very people who would raise alarms about the influence of the spanish language, are "foreign" phrases.

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I read a couple of SF novels: Ursula K. LeGuin's the telling and Mcauley's Child of the River. The telling Hainish cycle, the same setup as her most famous novel, The Left Hand of Darkness. In LHD we follow an early explorer sent to test the waters on a new planet to see if they are ready to become part of the Ekumen (federation of planets); in this newer novel we follow Sutty, an Observer on a planet recently accepted into the Ekumen. Ironically Sutty leaves Earth, a religious fundamentalist state (can't every imagine that happening!), to work with Aka, a world controlled by fundamentalist materialist state which completely rejected any "backwards" religion. A novel which addresses the Chris Hedges debate we had earlier here about the new atheists.

"The telling" is what's left over from the religion which has been pushed out. Instead the god of reason is worshipped above all. The underground religion which Sutty finds defines the sacred simply as beauty and suffering. Le Guin seems to agree with Chris Hedges that a materialist secular funamentalist state is just as bad as a religious fundamentalist one.

Overall an interesting read, especially as a companion to LHD, but it doesn't even approach the rich complexities and gender bending of LHD.

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Child of the River by Paul Mcauley also brought me back to the new atheist debate: "Most men are no different from beasts of burden, their spirits broken by fear of the phantoms of religion invoked by priests and bureaucrats." Confluence seems to be the left over garbage from a genetic experiment gone wrong. There are hundreds of bloodlines, almost all of them mixes between humans and animals, except for one: an orphaned boy named Yama. We follow Yama as he tries to discover his ancestral roots while at the same time uncover his hidden talents to control the many machines. I like Yama as a hero. He makes mistakes and has sex with Tamora who is from one of the animal bloodlines, a carniverous race his kills prey and eats them raw. Nothing like sex that leaves the hero with scratches on his flanks and nips out of his shoulder AND can't lead to pregnancy. SF at its best boyhood juvenile self.

The sex was in celebration of their victory over the merchant rogue star-sailor, a species which inhabits and then discards others' bodies. When I met this rogue, I immediately thought of Jabba the hut from The Empire Strikes Back:

Yama halted a few paces from him and bowed from the waist, but the merchant did not acknowledge him. . . the musicians played through the variations of their raga and the merchant ate a dozen pastries one after the other and stroked the gleaming pillows of the woman's large breasts with swollen , ring-encrusted fingers. Like her master, the woman was quite without hair. The petals of her labia were pierced with rings; from one of these rings a fine gold chain ran to a bracelet on the merchant's wrist.

Ouch! Can you say mysogynistic? As you might guess there's quite a battle to wrench power from the x-rated Jabba and finally kill him.

Hmm, I didn't mean to focus so much on sex; even though the book has a raw feel, there's not nearly as much sex as one might suspect from my discussion here.

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Movies:

The Savages: loved every minute of Laura Linney's and Phillip Seymour Hoffman's performances.

Father Ted: Season 2 As always, hilarious.

Man on wire: Phillipe Petit's walk across the two towers was audacious, nerve-racking, and crazy yet beautiful. Absolutely astounded by the years of preparation it took.

The Squid and the Whale: While I love both Laura Linney and Jeff Daniels, I didn't believe in their characters for one second. If a rampaging terrorist burst on the scence and shot the entire family, I would have barely flinched. I have no idea why many critics liked this film.

Happy Valley: We made it through 30 minutes and I'm quite confident no one did any editing of that 30 minutes--too bad.

Factotum: Matt Dillon still has it.

Transiberian: A pleasant find I'd never heard of--kind of a return to the old Woody Harrelson from Cheers but better.

Mississippi Masala: Early Denzel I'd missed; not your normal, cliched cross-cultural affair.

Heroes (the last 3 episodes of season #1) excellent modern SF but I'm thinking I will pass on season 2, 3, 4... Still, what a brilliant move to cast the funny Masi Oka as Hiro Nakamura.

If you made it this far, thanks. Writing it down, remembering what I liked and didn't, helps me feel like maybe I did actually do something over the last month.