Busy morning. I like it when I find myself working in a groove that doesn’t give me time to think about what isn’t working. Not today.
Over a foot of snow is now lying like a serene comforter over everything outside. Fluffly, white, very beautiful—if you don’t have to go out in it. I am a snow humbug. After learning to drive and struggling through a few winters way back then, I quickly lost my love of snow. Pain in the ass. Would be nice to look at, but go out in it?
Anyway, yesterday I had a snow day from work. So I took care of a lot of pending stuff, including laundry. This morning I’m finishing up the pending stuff. I wrote a new book review and emailed it off to my editor. And I am busily building a…
Yes, indeed. One more bit of distraction to make the writing of great literature a bit more difficult to get to.
Not really. Once the shiny wears off, it’ll be much like the other online pages I now have, like my MySpace Page and my Shelfari Page and my LinkedIn Page…
I’d been told, though, that all the “serious” people were on Facebook, as opposed to MySpace, and I must admit that so far that seems to be true. I’ve found many more of the sorts of folks I’d wanted to link to on MySpace but couldn’t, because they weren’t there, here on Facebook. So cool.
I really should just sit back now, though, and see how many friend invites I actually get. I’ve cast my net to many and sundry and various to at least establish a friend list, but I ought to go write some fiction and let this thing churn.
On another front, I finished a couple of new books for review. Jack McDevitt, who is a very nice man and a reliably entertaining writer, had Ace send me his most recent, The Devil’s Eye. It was a quick, enjoyable read, smart people’s SF, and I intend to do a few paragraphs for the Post.
I finished Ian McDonald’s collection Cyberbad Days last week. I already wrote two reviews of it and sent one off. I’ll add it to the one I do for Jack. I need one more for the roundup…
Have to go to work today. The sun in shining, it’s a tad warmer.
I’m rambling here. But what the hell. Last night we watched episode #2 of Lie To Me, the new series with Tim Roth as a specialist in lying. All the scientific acumen of his cinsiderable gifts are applied each week to determine who is lying and, more importantly, what about. I can’t help wondering how much grief this show might cause among people who, after a few episodes, will start applying some of these techniques in their own lives. Calling someone out for a lie can be a dicey proposition. Even when we know they’re lying, how often do we know why? And how often would calling them on it do the slightest bit of good?
I don’t know. I’ve wrestled with this one for decades. But it’s an amusing show.
The thing about these new shows—and there are several of them that all rely on the heightened experience of a trained observer, like Bones, The Mentalist, Eleventh Hour, House—is that while I applaud the foregrounding of rational observation and and a hardnosed skeptical approach to life these series embody, you have to realize that the degree of observational skill these characters bring to the task is the equivalent of an expert martial artist. Most people are not that observant. And even when they are, how many people know how to correctly interpret what they’re observing? It’s the thing that made Sherlock Holmes both fascinating and alienating. Holmes explained early on in the series that he refused to remember any detail that did not directly bear on his chosen pursuit—which meant he was, in this instance, unaware that the Earth moved around the Sun and, now that Watson had told him so, he intended to forget it as quickly as possible. It made him strange, weird, offputting, and Conan Doyle played on that skillfully. It’s the one thing the Basil Rathbone portrayals got wrong and expunged and the thing that Jeremy Brett brought to the forefront, which makes the Brett portrayal superior.
In the case of House, who is in many ways a direct copy, it just makes him obnoxious.
And not really a very good doctor…