Cruel TV

It's interesting (to me at least) is that my tastes in tv have definitely shifted.  I mean I really never watched all that much TV, at least after leaving the dorm in my second year of university.  And indeed there are many classic shows that I haven't watched at all, including Twin Peaks, The Sopranos, The Wire, Lost (at least the early seasons), Breaking Bad, Game of Thrones, The Walking Dead, etc.  Odds are if it aired after the 80s I probably haven't watched it and certainly didn't follow it with the exception of Blackadder (technically an 80s show except for the Back and Forth Special), Northern Exposure, Red Dwarf, Futurama, Firefly (hmm, sensing a theme here), The Simpsons (though I finally threw in the towel and stopped watching in 2014 or so), Father Ted, Black Books, Arrested Development, The IT Crowd, Malcolm in the Middle, My Name is Earl, Extras, The PJs (with Eddie Murphy as a claymation superintendent) or the animated version of Corner Gas.  To be honest, I don't think I've missed that much, though one day I'll probably watch Breaking Bad and maybe Better Call Saul.*

Maybe it is an extremely naive view of television comedies, but it seems to me they can be organized along a spectrum of how cruel are the characters to each other (all in the name of "fun" of course).  Is one character always the butt of jokes or is this distributed around more equally (as was arguably the case with Friends)?  Or in fact is it a more gentle comedy where humour arises from misunderstandings that can be put right by the end of the episode (say in The Cosby Show or The Vicar of Dibley)? Conversely is there one focal point for the negative energy of the show (the "heel" in wrestling parlance) or are all the characters basically jerks, cynical or not?  So for instance in Taxi, Louie (the character played by Danny DeVito) was the heel, whereas almost everyone is terrible in It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia (also with DeVito) or The Trailer Park Boys.

Really good comedies can run right up to the line of it just being too much (Arrested Development and Black Books), but it is a fine line  I'm finding that John Cleese as Basil Fawlty is just too brittle and high-strung for me and his wife is just uniformly awful to him.  I'm sure I liked this much more when younger, but it is making me cringe now and not in a good way (and indeed I couldn't bear one of Cleese's favourite sketches from At Last the 1948 Show where he amps up the frustrated hostility far too early for my tastes).

No question I think there is just a higher undercurrent of hostility in British comedy than US comedy, which generally does pull its punches more.  And maybe because I haven't been as exposed to it for a while, I find it too much right now.  Or because I am so unhappy about the state of the world, I can't really enjoy the claustrophobic nature of Fawlty Towers and how everyone except for Polly is so grating (and indeed clearly has so much contempt for everyone else, which truly is shocking to American sensitivities).  I'll get a few more episodes in, but if it is still just winding me up and it isn't enjoyable, then I'll bail.  (I'm pretty sure that my son won't appreciate The Young Ones for all kinds of reasons, and at any rate I'm leaving that for last, even after Max Headroom!)  Perhaps it is something about the manic energy combined with the cruelty that is setting me off.  Blackadder himself is fairly cruel as a person and the show embodies a fairly misanthropic outlook, but I enjoyed it as much as ever, though it is fair to say that the overall pace is more measured than Fawlty Towers or The Young Ones for that matter, and also it is only Blackadder as the cruel one with generally two foils -- Baldrick and Percy or the Prince or George -- though of course Queen Elizabeth had her special brand of whimsical cruelty and Captain Darling was a bit of a bastard.

Anyway, those are my disjointed musings on the topic.  No question I've gone a lot softer and don't really enjoy gratuitous cruelty anymore, which is also why I stopped watching Ricky Gervais projects...

 

* To be completely honest, though I would never have tuned in on my own, I have watched a few random episodes of X-Files, 30 Rock, Community, Parks and Rec, Monk, Will and Grace, SNL and Scrubs, and back when I was still doing business travel I would sometimes watch whatever Adult Swim was showing at the time, if the hotel had Cartoon Network.  And I've caught flashes of Friends, Chuck, The Office and The Blacklist, though I don't think I even sat down and watched a full episode.  There used to be all kinds of tv shows running at the gym, but I don't think it counts if I don't have the sound playing, do you?

Flash Updates

I've been struggling to migrate bank accounts and make sure I could pay my taxes (so I could file without asking for an extension), and I just managed to do that.  Today was sunny if a bit chilly, and I ran up to the Danforth to mail them off.  That's a load off my mind.  I guess I have the rest of the week to try to get a different home insurance policy, as I am quite unhappy with my current insurance company.  

This weekend (really Saturday evening), I finally sat down and wrote out a short play I've been thinking about since last summer!  It's about a very lonely barista in an abandoned food court.  I guess I only write out these short plays when there is an audience, and SFYS has been on hiatus for a long time.  However, it is restarting on May 3!  Normally, we would have had up until the last weekend (i.e. the upcoming weekend) but there was such pent-up demand that they didn't need to wait.  I was already told that my piece is on the slate, which is great.  Details and the link to the event will eventually be posted here.  It's nice to not sweat the deadline for once, and maybe I can work on a few other pieces I have been toying with.  If I extended my Pandemic Diaries piece and wrote long piece on urban planners I might have enough to do a Zoom event.  Something I might target in May (about a year after the first one) or June.

I haven't really decided if I will start reviewing books formally or semi-formally again.  I probably could make up for lost time if I largely stuck to poetry, which is largely what I've been reading lately (aside from Don Quixote and now Under the Volcano).

I only just today learned that Talonbooks has published a major new collection by George Bowering, Taking Measures, which collects most of his book-length serial poems.  I have much but not all of this in an earlier Selected Poems.  They are also publishing Daphne Marlatt's early works, including Vancouver Poems, in Intertidal.  I'm definitely going to order the Bowering.  I'm less sure about the Marlatt collection.  The library has both, and I'll check them out, along with Marlatt's recent book, Then Now, to see how I feel about them.  Whichever I choose will be a bit of a belated birthday present to myself.  I was going to order them directly from Talonbooks, but the shipping is simply outrageous.  It looks like Queen Books can special order them all as well as pre-order Bowering's latest Could Be, so I'll do so and pick them up at a later time, since curbside pickup is still allowed.

I had hoped to watch a French comedy over the weekend (Tati or Etaix), but my son had a bit too much homework.  We watched an episode of Blackaddder IV instead.  I really don't think I've seen that much of this particular season, though I think I managed to see all or nearly all of the 2nd and 3rd seasons.  At this point I expect we'll watch the last episode tomorrow and then the Back and Forth special on Wed.  And then on to Fawlty Towers.

Krazy Kat Redux

As a short update to this post, I asked Fantagraphics again about their plans for George Herriman.  This time around, they actually responded.  They said that Stumble Inn was being shelved indefinitely.  That's a real shame.  It appears that it had a 4 year run as a Sunday strip and a six month run as a daily.  That could probably all be contained in one mega-volume or a 2 volume set (with slip cover, naturally).  It's hard to say from just a few on-line strips, but I think I'd enjoy it.  I would certainly buy it if Fantagraphics or some other publisher puts it out.  I think it is in the public domain at this point...

Fantagraphic did confirm that they are going to start in on the Krazy Kat dailies but not until 2023.  I'll have to think long and hard about that, seeing how many volumes they anticipate, what the cost would be and just how much space it will take up!

I am such a completist that I probably don't want to start unless I am fairly sure Fantagraphics will commit to the whole thing.  Anyway, it looks like I have some time to make up my mind...

Edit (4/26): I actually have two pretty decent examples of the dailies.  The Pacific Comics Club put out a small book with all the 1921 dailies, and then IDW did a focused "Tiger Tea" volume with most of the dailies from 1936-37.  The strips themselves have just the most basic plots, but the wordplay is sometimes quite unique, but what really stands out is that the backgrounds change from panel to panel (and in that sense the example above is not a good example at all).  It might be a stretch to call this surreal, but it is unusual, and maybe I will try to pick up the dailies starting in 2023 after all.  I did see that PCC issued two more volumes collecting 1922 and 1923.  While not in stock in stores, I should be able to pick them up directly from the club.

Short Kennedy interlude

As I was thinking over books that I really would like to get to in the next year or two, so as to enjoy them before I am completely over the hill, someone left a copy of Raymond Kennedy's Ride a Cockhorse (the NYRB edition) in the Little Free Library in the front yard.  While I actually own a different edition, I did pull this out and read the intro.  However, this copy clearly belonged to a smoker, so I put it back after I was done.  The novel seems like quite a romp, with as much manic energy as A Confederacy of Dunces.  So I will add it to my short-term list and see if I can get to it by the summer. 

There's no question that Ride a Cockhorse is Kennedy's masterpiece, though he actually wrote 8 novels, most set near Holyoke, Mass., though The Bitterest Age is a WWII novel set in Germany!

I vaguely remembered that another one of his novels had almost "broke through," so I did a bit of digging and found that Lulu Incognito was a Vintage Contemporary title.  

Oddly enough, this isn't at Robarts, though a few of his other novels are in the stacks, including Good Night, Jupiter, as well as Columbine, which apparently features a hapless WWII vet who gets entangled with a precocious 13 year old (Leaping Shades of Lolita, Batman!).  There is a copy of Lulu in the Toronto Public Library, but only a non-circulating reference copy.  I've already mentioned how silly I think this for fiction, so no point in repeating myself.  Because it was a Vintage book with a pretty cool cover, I went ahead and ordered an out-of-print copy, even though I don't expect it will be as good as Cockhorse.  Who knows, maybe it will make it here around my birthday.

What Am I Actually Reading?

I've basically given up on my main reading list and likely will not return to it for some time (maybe a year or more).  Looking over my current reading, it breaks into three categories: poetry, random short books I plan to give away and stone-cold classics.

I'm not sure if I ever will pull together an anthology revolving around transportation poetry, but it's not a terrible dream.  I do, however, need to find a place to keep track of the poems I stumble across, or this will just be too frustrating (when I forget where I located them...).  Anyway, at the moment I am alternating between reading Kenneth Rexroth, David Ignatow and John Berryman and more contemporary Canadian poets (generally published by Talonbooks, House of Anansi or Brick Books).  As it happens, Brick Books is running a sale on their ebooks, probably running through April, and I picked up Grey All Over by Andrea Actis and House Dreams by Deanna Young.

Mostly I am trying to get rid a lot of books; thinking of books as disposable probably unintentionally leads me to value them less.  A while back I read Hemingway's To Have and Have Not, which I didn't like at all.  In fact, it led to a bit of an internet spat, which I really don't engage in often, and I may or may not go into this at more length.  At any rate, I couldn't wait to get this out of the house.  I'm not really digging Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest that much either, as it is frankly so predictable and a bit too long.  I'm not as far along, but The House on Major Street is better, though arguably Leon Rooke was shamelessly cribbing from Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita (though clearly one should only steal from the best...).  Other books on the stack are Tibor Fischer's The Collector Collector, Atwood's Payback, Risk and Culture, John Williams's Stoner, William Trevor's Mrs. Eckdorf in O'Neill's Hotel  and David Lodge's Therapy (though apparently I'll need to get familiar with Kierkegaard before tackling the Lodge (!)). But at least I am making some progress in getting books out of the house.*

Naturally, I rebel a bit at this and long for some "quality" reading.  I have finally returned to Don Quixote.  Not sure what will follow after, though lately I have been drawn to Lowry's Under the Volcano and Joyce Cary's 1st trilogy and the newish translation of Crime and Punishment.  Other books that fall into this category (but are so long I may hold off a bit) are Grossman's Stalingrad and Life and Fate, Tolstoy's War and Peace, Perec's Life: A User's Manual and rereading The Brothers Karamazov.**  I guess more than anything, I am trying not to put off these books indefinitely, but it is harder to find time than I would like, especially without reading on the train or while on a stationary bike at the gym.  

* While there is definitely less pressure, as there is no decluttering benefit, I probably should also come up with a list of my highest priority e-books.  I could create a folder on my Kindle, but I can list them here as well.

** I guess it is only half rereading if it is a different translation, right?  That is sort of my reasoning with Don Quixote, where the new translation is definitely better, even if I find the character wholly exasperating.

Losing My Mind (Misplacing Things)

One of my more annoying habits is that I tend to get distracted when handling (or really listening to) a large stack of CDs and less frequently DVDs -- and don't always take the time to put them all back in the right cases.  Generally, I am able to fix them in the evening before crashing, but if I don't then it can be a real problem.  I am not generating nearly as many data DVDs as I used to (I guess finally trusting external hard drives a bit more), but the very worst is when I put music CD or DVD into a tall stack of data DVDs.  And then this is magnified about a hundredfold after a move.  There are a handful of missing music CDs that went missing in the last move (all the way back in 2015) and some that I haven't seen since we moved to Toronto from Vancouver in 2014. Even a relatively recent clearing out of the basement, and I am somehow missing a couple of Tragically Hip CDs (that I was listening to as I was working).  These are fairly likely to turn up soon, but it's still annoying.

Ironically, I have finally given up on getting any reasonable amount of money for my used CDs (and selling them on eBay or Amazon is just far too much of a hassle these days, and not worth it with the huge spike in mailing costs).  I was pulling together a big pile of CDs to sell off at the handful of remaining stores that still buy used CDs when the stay-at-home order came down again, spoiling my plans.  

I probably need to clear out enough space just to sort through everything and try to find what's misplaced.  This will be a fairly massive undertaking, and I have to be willing to actually toss the redundant data DVDs as well.  Now I did get rid of a box of cassette tapes, along with digitizing a box and a half of old paper, so I am very gradually becoming a bit less of a hoarder.  But it is hard going.

I'm on the lookout for The IT Crowd and Fawlty Towers (most likely in the master bedroom somewhere*).  A much, much harder task will be to find the 2nd disc of season 2 of Spaced (missing for quite some time) and the 2nd disc of season 8 (the final season) of Futurama.  I vaguely remember watching this with the kids in Vancouver, so it very likely is just in one of the Disney movie cases when I got careless about putting things away, but it's still not going to be easy to track down, sort of like a needle in a data haystack.

It would be nice to think that I have learned my lesson -- and at least I have cut way, way back on buying new things, having finally joined the streaming revolution.  But it seems I am a slow learner, given how many times this keeps happening to me.  Maybe this really can be the last time I am so careless, but given my history I probably shouldn't count on it.

* I did find Fawlty Towers and The IT Crowd in one semi-logical place, along with Father Ted -- and Black Books(!), which I also need to add to my list of must-rewatch sitcoms.  Red Dwarf and Futurama will just be bumped in the queue.  Interestingly, I did track down the Max Headroom set, which I own but haven't watched.  Not entirely sure how my son would react to such a blast of 80s nostalgia...

Mini Movie Update

We watched Some Like It Hot last night.  What a great movie.  It's been quite some time since I've seen the whole thing.  I've tentatively added The Apartment and The Sweet Smell of Success to the pile.  I've seen snatches of both, but I don't think I've seen either all the way through, which is something I clearly need to correct.  I'm guessing it will take 2-3 months to get through the movies, though some of the 90 minute movies may occasionally be snuck in on the random school night.  

Toward the end of the film noirs, I'll add Anatomy of a Murder, as it is a good link to Hitchcock, specifically Rear Window and Vertigo.  I'm thinking maybe I will turn to the Marx Brothers before Keaton and Chaplin, just because they appeal to me more.

It will likely take me another month or two to get through Don Quixote, as I am usually only reading a chapter or two a night (after a long layoff).  It looks like 2 years ago, I came close to checking out Gilliam's The Man Who Killed Don Quixote but it had such a ridiculously short run in Toronto (literally two days only!) that I couldn't swing it.  I did pick up the DVD, however, and I'll make sure to watch it as I am wrapping up the book.  Most likely my son will be interested.

Depending on what else is going on, both at work and in cleaning up around the house, I may watch some of the Rohmer, Goddard, Varda, Bresson, Truffaut, Ray, Ozu, and Kurosawa films that I don't will grab him as much.  I've been collected DVDs for a really long time, and it's time that I actually try to watch the best of them!