The ebook files for the titles discussed below are available at the downloads page. All publication rights remain with the copyright holders.

The Twelve Kingdoms novels have been licensed by Seven Seas Entertainment. Bookstore links will appear when they are published.

For additional commentary about the Twelve Kingdoms and the translation process, see Kate's Interview with a Translator series.

Youko/Keiki
1. Tsuki no Kage, Kage no Umi. My translation: Shadow of the Moon, a Sea of Shadows.

2. Kaze no Banri, Reimei no Sora. My translation: A Thousand Leagues of Wind, the Sky at Dawn.

Youko, Suzu, and Shoukei join forces to defeat corrupt government leaders in Wa Province.

3. Tasogare no Kishi, Akatsuki no Sora. My translation: The Shore in Twilight, the Sky at Daybreak.

Risai escapes to Kei and asks Youko for help rescuing Taiki. Taiki and Youko are contemporaries.

Gyousou/Taiki

Fuyumi Ono wrote The Demon Child before she started the Twelve Kingdoms series. See link below. She covers some of this material in The Shore in Twilight, The Sky at Daybreak. In Kaze no Umi, Meikyu no Kishi ("A Sea of Wind, Shores of the Labyrinth"), Taiki choose Gyousou as Emperor of Tai. See links below. 

1. Tasogare no Kishi, Akatsuki no Sora. My translation: The Shore in Twilight, the Sky at Daybreak.

Risai escapes to Kei and asks Youko for help rescuing Taiki. Taiki and Youko are contemporaries.

2. Shirogane no Oka, Kuro no Tsuki. My translation: Hills of Silver Ruins, a Pitch Black Moon (book I  II  III  IV). 

Risai and Taiki return to Tai. They recruit a small band of allies to search for Gyousou and take back the kingdom.

Shouryuu/Enki
Higashi no Watatsumi, Nishi no Sokai. My translation: Poseidon of the East, Vast Blue Seas of the West.

Shushou/Kyouki

Tonan no Tsubasa. My translation: The Wings of Dreams. 

Kyouki chooses Shushou as Empress of Kyou. (Shoukei encounters Shushou in A Thousand Leagues of Wind.)

Short Story Collections
Kasho no Yume. My translation: Dreaming of Paradise.

• (冬栄) "Winter Splendor" (Touei): takes place in Tai and Ren during The Shore in Twilight, the Sky at Daybreak.
• (乗月) "Jougetsu": takes place in Hou after A Thousand Leagues of Wind, the Sky at Dawn.
• (書簡) "Pen-Pals" (Shokan): takes place in Kei and En after Shadow of the Moon, a Sea of Shadows.
• (華胥) "Dreaming of Paradise" (Kasho): takes place in Sai sometime before A Thousand Leagues of Wind, the Sky at Dawn.
• (帰山) "Kizan": takes place in Ryuu and Sou after A Thousand Leagues of Wind, the Sky at Dawn.

Hisho no Tori. My translation: Hisho's Birds.

• (丕緒の鳥) "Hisho's Birds" (Hisho no Tori): takes place before and shortly after the coronation of Youko as Empress of Kei.
• (落照の獄) "Prison of Dusk" Rakushou no Goku: references to Ryuu and Emperor Chuutatsu suggest the beginning of Youko's reign.
• (青条の蘭) "Blue Orchid" (Seijou no Ran): takes place in En before Rokuta chooses Shouryuu as the next Emperor.
• (風信) "Weather Vane" (Fuushin): takes place during the last days of Empress Yo of Kei, and then following her death. 

 Non-Woodbury Translations
  Translations of Masho no Ko ("The Demon Child") and Kaze no Umi, Meikyu no Kishi ("A Sea of Wind, Shores of the Labyrinth") are available at the Worlds in Translation website.  The TokyoPop translation of Tsuki no Kage, Kage no Umi is available here: The Twelve Kingdoms: Sea of Shadow. 
The TokyoPop translation of Kaze no Banri, Reimei no Sora is available here: The Twelve Kingdoms: The Skies of Dawn. The TokyoPop translation of Kaze no Umi, Meikyu no Kishi ("A Sea of Wind, Shores of the Labyrinth") is available here: The Twelve Kingdoms: Sea of Wind.   The TokyoPop translation of Higashi no Watatsumi, Nishi no Sokai is available here: The Vast Spread of the Seas.  Resources & Other Notes
I've created my own abridged glossary. An overview of the Twelve Kingdoms universe can be found at Wikipedia (English Japanese). The Twelve Kingdoms Wiki has scans of the illustrations and additional artwork.

My go-to resource while translating the novels has been Yoshie Omura's Twelve Kingdoms Room (Japanese). Also see the Twelve Kingdoms Database (Japanese).

Fuyumi Ono borrows much of the political terminology from medieval China. Harvard University's "Dictionary of Official Titles in Imperial China" (PDF) provides useful clues about the English equivalents.

However, we are talking about a fantasy series, so historical translations are not always exact. The organizational charts at Twelve Kingdoms Memo (Japanese) have proved quite helpful.

The NHK anime can be streamed at Tubi and Crunchyroll (regional restrictions may apply). The Blu-ray edition is available from Discotek Media.

Labels: 12 kingdoms, books, crunchyroll, fantasy, japanese, kate, publishing, translations, tubi

Girls und Panzer is a textbook example of how to launch a story in medias res without any title cards or opening crawls or expository dialogue to establish and explain the crazy backstory. You either suspend disbelief from the get-go or you don't.

Director Tsutomu Mizushima and veteran screenwriter and manga artist Reiko Yoshida throw so much insanity onto the screen in the first episode, while treating it all as "normal," that you find yourself scratching your head and nodding and saying to yourself, "Hmm, you know, I guess it kinda sorta makes sense."

NO, IT DOESN'T! IT DOESN'T MAKE ANY SENSE AT ALL!

The premise here is that high schools engage in war games as an extramural sport, with national championships and everything. Not in a virtual world (that'd be somewhat plausible), but with fully operational platoons of vintage WWII tanks, adding up to more rolling armor than most of the world's militaries.

All the caveats about "safety measures" notwithstanding, even if the shells were blanks (they're not), accidents alone would rack up a serious body count. The "sport" is not without some risks—Miho had previously quit after one such accident—but supposedly "risky" the same way that American football is "risky."

Yeah, no. I mean, there's suspending disbelief and then there's disbelieving the most rudimentary laws of physics.


Nor did I get a satisfactory explanation—aside from a single line of dialogue when a character poses the same question—of why entire towns are built atop gigantic aircraft carriers. Because, that's why.

Yet I couldn't stop watching. It absolutely shouldn't, but the whole thing simply works at every level. Girls und Panzer is a rollicking good time from beginning to end, and the movie sequels are just as much goofy fun.

At the story level, this shouldn't be all that surprising. The sports genre has been a reliable mainstay of manga and anime for half a century, and Girls und Panzer constitutes a solid entry in the canon. As such, the almost entirely plot-driven narrative makes it easier to look past the inherent craziness.


It's also a classic underdog story, as Miho has to figure out how to defeat larger and better equipped teams with her oddball tanks and crews. (Like "oddball," the series is peppered with references to Kelly's Heroes.)

You see, when Oarai Girls High School previously shut down the program for lack of interest and funds and sold off the equipment, the only tanks left were the ones nobody else wanted.

Although the focus of the series is on the tanks and the competitions, human drama is not absent. An interesting dynamic plays out between Miho, Maho (her older sister), and their mother. Naturally, the national championship comes down to a battle between the two tanks personally commanded by Miho and Maho.

I think we have a winner in the sibling rivalry metaphor department.

In fact, it is so easy to get caught up in the competitions and Miho's ingenious solutions to one impossible predicament after the next that you can easily overlook the the most compelling thing about Girls und Panzer. The girls.

These are all-girl teams in an all-girl competition in what is (as far as I can tell) an all-girl sport.

They're teenagers, of course, so the subject of boys comes up. But not a speck of drama or plot development revolves around a boy. I don't think a teenage boy appears on screen. Men pop up here and there in peripheral supporting roles. But from beginning to end, every major character is female.

And yet we don't hear one speck of political or social commentary about this obvious fact either.

Miho's recruiting campaign (Oarai High is desperately short of tank crews) argues that tankery as a martial art is a great way to improve a girl's feminine attributes.

Historically, this argument is not that big of a reach. It was common practice in medieval Japan for the daughters of noblemen and samurai to study the naginata (halberd). Today, high school girls regularly participate in the traditional martial arts of judo, kendo (fencing), and kyudo (archery).

Hana Isuzu, Miho's gunner, comes from a family famous for its skill at kado (ikebana or flower arrangement). Hana's mother is initially opposed to her daughter's participation in tankery, but will later concede that it has improved Hana's artistic skill and expressiveness at flower arrangement.

Nobody at any point questions the ability of girls (as a sex) to operate tanks and command tank platoons. There's an important lesson here. The complete absence of "messaging" about the female composition of this heavily armored Herland makes the inherent message that much more appealing to boys.

The manga and light novels were serialized in seinen magazines (aimed at young adult males). And yet, aside from the standard short skirts and an obligatory hot springs scene, there's barely any fan service. Again, this is first and foremost a sports anime. It's all about winning the tank battles.

Tank battles fought by girls. In their Panzers.

Related videos

Girls und Panzer (CR) (HD) (NF)
Girls und Panzer OVA
Girls und Panzer Anzio
Girls und Panzer der Film (HD) (NF)

Labels: anime, anime reviews, hidive, japanese culture, kate, netflix, pop culture, social studies, thinking about writing

When it comes to narrative arcs in television dramas, the strong arc requires a soft arc but not necessarily visa-versa.


Most anime series have fairly strong arc storylines. A typical cour runs 13 or so 30-minute episodes, so can be digested in a couple of binge-viewing sessions. Beyond the Boundary ran 11 episodes, at least two episodes too few. Eureka 7 ran a strong arc through 50 episodes, twice as many as needed.


Narrative disasters occur when a dramatic arc expected to last a season or two proves more popular than its creators expected. They then drag out the premise the series began with. The result is that nothing gets resolved and all kinds of nonsensical reasons have to be concocted to keep them from getting resolved.

(On the other hand, Detective Conan has run so long I wonder if anybody remembers the weird premise it began with or expects it to ever get resolved.)

Eventually, the writers run out of things to write about and fall back on melodrama. That's when I stop watching. Nothing is more frustrating than a enjoyable genre series that runs out of material and resorts to characters screwing up their lives with angsty self-involvement and rank stupidity.

I might have watched more than ten cumulative minutes of Friends if Ross and Rachel got hit by an asteroid at the end of the first season so we could focus on Monica and Chandler, whose relationship actually matures. The relationship between Niles and Daphne progressed on Frasier, though took too long getting there.

Big Bang Theory is not only funnier but more entertaining when the characters grow and develop in positive ways, not slip and fall on the same banana peel week after week.

I suspect that soft arcs often harden because the writers worry about running out of story material. Afraid of repeating themselves, they resort to what Kate calls the compulsion to "CHANGE, SHOCK, DO SOMETHING DIFFERENT!" But the result isn't "something different." It's endless reruns of Groundhog Day.

Sure, Groundhog Day is amusing for two hours. Year after interminable year, it would define an inner circle of hell. But as Groundhog Day points out, breaking free of this perdition doesn't involve dramatic gestures so much as it requires steady personal growth, mostly ordinary characters improving on being ordinary.

Working with the full knowledge that there is nothing new under the sun is much more liberating. As Kate points out, Agatha Christie built a successful career out of being obvious and doing the "same old thing" over and again.

What makes Christie so great is the simplicity of her story ideas. Story often comes down to one idea. The telling may be elaborate (red herrings plus more red herrings plus more red herrings), but the ultimate denouement is not complicated at all.

Overextended strong arcs are bad enough. When the Decima Technologies arc derailed the premise of Person of Interest, it mutated from a series into an updated version of the Saturday morning serial. Individual episodes simply served to chop an increasingly implausible plot into digestible pieces.


That's unfortunately what also happened with the Ori arc on Stargate.

Watching the first season of 24 cured me of the desire to watch any of the sequels. At this point, we're in telenovela territory. Most live-action Japanese dramas are compact versions of the telenovela, with a single cour lasting around 10 episodes. Except for the Asadora, I usually give them a pass too.

Ten hours of conflict and angst is bad enough. When it's the exact same conflict and angst (and no resolution) week after week (until the last episode), it's unbearable. (Though a series like I'm Mita, Your Housekeeper can win me over with unique characters, episodic plotting, and a touch of magical realism.)

Or the exact same crime, as in police procedurals that take a single mystery and stretch it out over a dozen hours. No, I am not going to wait that long to find out whodunit, not when Columbo can figure the whole thing out in ninety minutes.

Labels: anime, asadora, japanese tv, kate, manga, television, thinking about writing

Rewatching the early seasons of The X-Files, I'm impressed how effective it is when doing one-off mysteries. Granted, the big conspiracy stuff is fun because it has that classic noir look (with great supporting actors). But think about it for five seconds and it's awfully silly and ages awfully fast, very much a product of the times.

Stargate has the same issue with the Goa'uld and the Replicators, and I got too bored with the Ori to keep watching. The Stargate producers purposely set up each arc with a Big Bad at the center of the ongoing drama. It's a reliable formula, but one that eventually poisons its own well.

Still, the standalone episodes of Stargate are often flat-out fantastic.

This is a persistent problem with "strong arc" storylines, wherein the setup and resolution of each episode depends on the preceding episode and dictates the substance of the one that follows. I think removing the need to maintain the episodic continuity of the arc can free writers to wax more creative.

The original Star Trek holds up well because there pretty much is no arc, making it easy to ignore the mediocre shows and feast on the great ones. I recent saw "Arena" again, and despite the Gorn captain looking like he'd just strolled off the set of a Godzilla movie, boy, does it make for a great short story.

Same with "A Taste of Armageddon" and "Errand of Mercy" and "City on the Edge of Forever." Knowing nothing about the Star Trek universe would not diminish the viewer's ability to grasp the entire point of these stories.

But especially in longer series with relatively stable casts, expectations of some sort of plausible continuity and evolution in the "soft arc" must be met (unless, like The Simpsons, the expectation is established early on that the show will reset after each episode).

Star Trek didn't run long enough to worry about the Starfleet org chart. But Star Trek: TNG took too long to explain what Riker's problem was. As a military history like The Admirals: Nimitz, Halsey, Leahy, King makes clear, no serious military man turns down a promotion (he maneuvers for the one he wants).

Giving Riker a sketchy past from the start would have created a more interesting dynamic between him and Picard (I blame Roddenberry's obsession with utopianism).

I agree with Kate that Bones gets it mostly right. Castle wades too far into soap opera territory for my tastes, but then rescues itself by poking fun at its own outrageousness, like having Castle travel to an alternate universe to solve a crime and deal with his personal issues.

Blue Bloods does a good job of changing things as naturally as the screenwriters can manage, which in the early seasons mostly had Danny and Jamie getting new partners and Frank dealing with a new mayor. Amy Carlson left before the start of this season. But each season arc rarely overwhelms the individual episodes.


Jack O'Neill and Samantha Carter get promoted on Stargate and, true to their characters, end up together with a minimum of histrionics. General Hammond retires. Even Michael Shanks leaving the show for a season appears mostly seamless in retrospect. Equipment evolves, weapons evolve, including how Teal'c outfits himself.


Done right, the "small stuff"—big emphasis on "small"—of natural character development can strengthen episodic dramas. Done wrong, it results in eye-rolling soap operas.

Speaking of Michael Shanks, Saving Hope gets it mostly wrong. I like the medical dramas and the supernatural stories that feature Shanks. But the season-long arcs are soapy to the the point of becoming unwatchable. This is even true of House in the later seasons, and it remains one of the best television dramas ever.

Cable series seem to be all about the strong arc, one of many reasons why I don't watch cable television dramas. But anime is all about the strong arc too. More about that next week.

To be continued . . .

Labels: kate, television, thinking about writing

The most interesting theological discourses on television these days come from a series that ostensibly has nothing to do with religion: Person of Interest.

With the battle now fully engaged between the Machine and Samaritan (echoing C.S. Lewis's contention that the Earth is, in fact, "enemy territory"), the one remaining challenge is providing John Greer (aka Decima, played by John Nolan, Jonathan Nolan's uncle) an underlying motivation that matches those of the rest of the cast.

The problem, as Kate points out, is that "the abstract nature of belief" makes "religion difficult to write about," even when couched in equally abstract metaphors.

In order for Martin Luther to argue against indulgences (a practical reality), he has to believe in something far more abstract (that the soul cannot buy its way into heaven or out of accountability). In order for Joseph Smith to argue against infant baptism (another practical reality), he has to believe that Adam and Eve's Fall from God's presence did not entail a fall into sin.

A "bigger worldview lies behind most theological arguments," and that's what often goes missing in the mundane scramble after plot. But it has to surface sometime, else the plot will end up chasing its own tail. At the end of season four, we do catch a compelling glimpse.

A skeptical Control confronts Decima in what can be analogized to the conflict between the Confucianists and the Hobbesian legalists of the Qin Dynasty. Confucians focused on the primacy of ethics and a virtuous ruler, while legalists believed that the whims of any ruler could be subsumed by the objective machine of the law.

Or in the case of Person of Interest, the algorithm. Outside a shrinking number of crumbling Marxist states, the most familiar implementations of legalism are Sharia and the Mosaic Law.


Under legalism, we have the right to do nothing, except for a finite subset of actions the state allows. By contrast, to assert that rights are inalienable" and "god-given" means that we have the right to do anything, except for a finite subset of actions the state deems to be crimes. And even then, we are "presumed innocent."

Legalists see only chaos in such expansive views of liberty. Like Hobbes, they argue that "[T]he purpose of the commonwealth is peace, and the sovereign has the right to do whatever he thinks necessary for the preserving of peace and security and prevention of discord."

In the tension between these two perspectives, we find the foundations of Christian theology as reflected in Milton (or The Pearl of Great Price), which casts the War in Heaven as a conflict between a Hobbesian view of life (man must be forced back into heaven) and one in which man has free will (and can only return via grace).

Wherefore, because that Satan rebelled against me, and sought to destroy the agency of man, which I, the Lord God, had given him, and also, that I should give unto him mine own power; by the power of mine Only Begotten, I caused that he should be cast down;

And he became Satan, yea, even the devil, the father of all lies, to deceive and to blind men, and to lead them captive at his will, even as many as would not hearken unto my voice.

The Machine is the "still small voice," while Samaritan is the enlightened despot. But in dramatic terms, while "justice" and "redemption" can be pursued forever (which is why we'll never run out of police procedurals), it's impossible to square Samaritan's objectives with reality. The world is too analog to "take over."

Every quest for world domination suffers the same fate: This too shall pass away. Entropy always wins in the end (perfectly symbolized by the fates of self-made enlightened despots like Elias and Dominic).

I can imagine Samaritan being oblivious to its own mortality, while John Greer is not. Hence his mission. The Machine knows its limitations, hence Root's procurement of the mysterious bulletproof attache case for reasons none of them understands at the time.

I think Jonathan Nolan is getting a better idea of what makes his machines tick. In the season four finale, Greer does a good job of articulating why the threat of filling the streets with stormtroopers was a diversion all along. He comes quite close to paraphrasing the legalist approach to pragmatic governance:

• The ruler exists to monopolize authority in order to prevent its abuse by feudal magnates [or federal bureaucrats].
• Special tactics or "secrets" should be taken by the ruler to ensure that others do gain not control of the state. Withdraw[ing] from affairs except to manage the course of ministers, the ruler . . . obscures his motivations. By these means, no one can subvert the state through sycophancy, but may only try to advance [within it] by heeding orders.
• The ruler uses the legal system to control the state; if the law is applied effectively, even a weak ruler will be strong.

The question is whether the show can avoid going down the Terminator rabbit hole. That seems the only way Hollywood knows how to resolve conflicts involving sentient machines: "Robots take over the world!" Samaritan will have to take over something quite different. "Robots take over the government!" won't do either.

Jonathan Nolan has created the most ingenious cyber thriller on television (the mesh network episode was one of the smartest ever). He's resorted to both "conspiracy mode" and "Dr. Evil mode" that I worried about here, but has managed to keep pulling the rabbit out of the hat so far.

The best solution can probably be found in how churches and states have sorted themselves out of the past two millennia. Greer could argue, for example, that for all its notoriety, the Spanish Inquisition was a much less gruesome affair than the Thirty Years' War, and that his way will bring more "souls" to "salvation."

On a side note [spoiler alert], Nolan exercises the tightest cast control in the business. He pulled a "Scully" with Sarah Shahi (for the same reason as Gillian Anderson). Like Scully, they've kept Sameen  alive, so I presume she'll be back. Camryn Manheim as Control ended up in dire straits, but I presume she'll be back too.

Enrico Colantoni is not so dead he can't come back. I liked Winston Duke as Dominic (another great bad guy from Nolan), but he's pretty dead. Martine (Cara Buono) is pretty dead too (after turning into the Terminatrix there for a while). Meanwhile, the Machine is in a literal box, reduced to a ghost in a shell.

Which means that, as things stand right now, we're back to the original cast size. You see, Joss Whedon, it can be done!

Oh, and the theme music for the penultimate scene of season four was recorded in 1975, but sounds like it was commissioned for this episode.

Related posts

The Difficulty of Writing About Religion
The Two Hands of Person of Interest, Season 3
Person of Interest
The IT enemy is us

Labels: kate, person of interest, politics, religion, robots, science, science fiction, technology, television, thinking about writing

My sister Kate recently mentioned some reading she'd been doing for a course in interpersonal communications she's teaching. This particular text [The Culture Map by Erin Meyer] roughly separates corporate cultures into the categories of "low" and "high" context.

The U.S. has a "low context" culture. Contemporary American culture has been distilled over the centuries from a varied immigrant population that do not share a common background, so things have to be spelled out. The fewer assumptions made the better.

Japan has a "high context" culture. They've shared the same operating manual for the past two millennia. If you don't share it, then you're expected to pretend until you do. But rather than "high" and "low," let's call it "go along to get along" versus "I'm from Missouri."

The value of "go along to get along" is that since cooperation is presumed, people do their best to cooperate. Nobody makes waves. Making waves just proves you weren't getting along and you're not a team player. (It probably also means you can't read minds.)

That attitude can leave you stuck when the boss assumes X has been communicated and you have no idea what X is. And his boss may simply be trying to communicate what his boss assumes he understood and is kicking the can down the hierarchical road.

According to novelist Kaoru Takamura (she began her career at a foreign trading company):

In an organization where the authority-responsibility structure is unclear, employees are unable to make their own decisions and must constantly refer to their superiors. But because these superiors are also unclear about their own authority, they can't make responsible decisions. Problems just get shuffled around and everyone ends up working longer hours.

It comes down to the ratio of actual work to CYA. The consensus-seeking, conflict-avoiding style of Japanese business easily becomes a way of avoiding blame. If you've got to cover your superior's ass, you're going to make sure your own ass is covered too.

So where the brash American might shrug and wing it, the cautious Japanese is going to hunker down and play it safe.

The hallowed business practices of ringi (the bottom-up circulation of new proposals) and nemawashi (the politicking that accompanies it) do produce a sense of collective responsibility and wa (harmony).

But they also obviate personal responsibility (the buck stops nowhere) and chew up tons of time and energy. Noah Smith states it bluntly: as a result, white-collar productivity in Japan is horrendous.

Employees sit idly in front of their computers waiting for the boss to leave so they can go home, or make busy-work for themselves, copying electronic records onto paper (yes, this is real!). Unproductive workers are kept on the payrolls because of lifetime employment, with high salaries guaranteed by the system of seniority pay. To this, add endless meetings, each of which must be exhaustively prepared for in advance. Layer upon layer of bureaucracy with poorly defined accountability.

There is a price for everything, and the one for "going along to get along" can be steep. However we love to decry the "adversarial system" in law, politics and commerce, as Churchill said of democracy, it's the worse system we've got . . . except for all the rest.

Labels: business, economics, japan, japanese culture, kate

I'd never gotten around to the last two novels in the Anne of Green Gables series. My brother Joe recently did. He didn't think much of Rilla of Ingleside or Kevin Sullivan's adaption (Anne of Green Gables: The Continuing Story).

I'd seen the latter too, which was in no way encouraging. Sullivan's Anne of Avonlea (also known as Anne of Green Gables: The Sequel) is a good example of how to deviate from the source material while keeping true to its substance and spirit.

The Continuing Story is a good example of getting it all wrong. Sullivan manages to turn Anne, as Kate puts it, into a "bucolic female James Bond." Yes, it's supposed to be about Rilla, but the lead had to be Megan Follows. Like I said, it's a mess.

Rather, Joe points to Rainbow Valley as the standout in the post-Green Gables books. So I clicked over to Project Gutenberg and downloaded it. And he was right. Rainbow Valley is a real gem.


As Joe points out, Rainbow Valley is less about the staid Blythe kids than the wacky Merediths. They're the offspring of the eccentric and widowed minister. Following the death of his wife, the children mostly raise themselves (not a social worker in sight).

Things only get dicier when Mary Vance shows up, the orphan girl they take in like a lost dog.

Mary Vance is the alternate universe version of Anne. While Anne coped by filling up on literature, focusing her mental energy inwards and fueling her imagination, Mary Vance turns hers outwards, with the goal of controlling the chaotic world around her.

Not surprising, given an upbringing that makes Anne's pre-Green Gables life look comfortable by comparison. Nowadays, Mary Vance would be cast as the pitiful victim on a Law & Order episode, a serial killer's childhood flashback on Criminal Minds.

"My grandfather was a rich man. I'll bet he was richer than your grandfather. But pa drunk it all up and ma, she did her part. They used to beat me, too. Laws, I've been licked so much I kind of like it."

Or pumped full of Ritalin and handed over to Child Protective Services. But a century ago, a tough childhood gave a kid "character." Indeed, Mary Vance isn't looking for excuses. To be a "victim" is to not be in control, and that's that last thing she wants.

Mary tossed her head. She divined that the manse children were pitying her for her many stripes and she did not want pity. She wanted to be envied.

With her considerable wit focused so long on day-to-day survival, the attendant niceties long ago went by the wayside. And so unconstrained by a still nascent superego, her id leaks out all over the place. She definitely gets all the good lines.

"Mr. Wiley used to mention hell when he was alive. He was always telling folks to go there. I thought it was some place over in New Brunswick where he come from."

"I haven't got anything against God, Una. I'm willing to give Him a chance. But, honest, I think He's an awful lot like your father, absent-minded and never taking any notice of a body most of the time, but sometimes waking up all of a sudden and being awful good and kind and sensible."

"Give me Daniel [in the Lions' Den]. I'd rusher have it 'cause I'm partial to lions. Only I wish they'd et Daniel up. It would have been more exciting."

"If one has to pray to anybody it'd be better to pray to the devil than to God. God's good, anyhow so you say, so He won't do you any harm, but from all I can make out the devil needs to be pacified."

As Miss Cornelia puts it, "If you dug for a thousand years you couldn't get to the bottom of that child's mind."

But Mary Vance hardly has the story all to herself. In the second half of the book, the misadventures of the untethered Meredith kids take over the story, along with the emergence of a possible romantic companion for their father (a sweet note to end on).

Reading Rainbow Valley is like listening to a gossipy small-town newspaper read aloud, the chronicler now and then stepping back from the narrative to offer an aside or two about her subjects. But always with the best intentions--and honest empathy--in mind.

Although I shy away from the omniscient point of view, Montgomery's relaxed command of the narrative is such that the "head hopping" never bothers me, and even imbues the story with a touch of magical realism that places it apart from the real world.

Though with the Great War just over the horizon, the book briefly breaks the reverie at the very end with a haunting bit of foreshadowing.

This was certainly a great part of Montgomery's appeal in Japan. Hanako Muraoka completed her translation of Anne of Green Gables during WWII. The Japanese edition was published in 1952. "Reality" was one thing they didn't need any more of.

Though as far as reality goes, Rainbow Valley hews closer to my own childhood (considerably less than a century ago) than the nanny state reigning today. Back then, the only parental constraint imposed on us as we flew out the door was: "Be home by dinnertime."

Labels: anne, book reviews, free-range kids, kate, social studies

As a tribute to my sister's cat Aurora, who departed for kitty heaven last week at the ripe old age of 19½ (that's 95 in human years), here's a wonderful show about cats.

Though I'm not a pet person, cats project a "leave-me-alone" aura I respect. A neighborhood cat likes to nap on my back porch. Now and then another cat shows up (I don't understand the appeal of my back porch) and they get one of those "When are you going to leave?" vs. "No, you first" standoffs.

Sometimes, company is neither desired nor appreciated. Hottoite (ほっといて): "Leave me alone and mind your own business." The term is discussed in the first video at 6:30 as a particular feline characteristic. "Unfortunately," Iwago observes, "cats aren't necessarily happy to be photographed."

I totally get it.


Dogs evolved to be attentive and empathic human companions, but the whole "give me attention" business gets wearying (that and treating the entire outdoors as a toilet). The neighbor's dog obsessively announces every change in the status quo, including things it's seen several hundred times already.

Meaning everybody and everything it doesn't actually live with. Clouds. Its own shadow. The wind. Passing neutrinos. Bark bark bark bark bark bark. Take a breath. Bark bark bark bark bark bark. And so on and so forth. Cats are infinitely more tolerable mammals to share your immediate environment with.

Which perhaps explains why Iwago's Cats (「岩合光昭の世界ネコ歩き」) is one of my favorite programs on NHK. It's produced by the same team that does Somewhere Street, NHK's equally understated travel show.


As the title suggests, wildlife videographer Mitsuaki Iwago travels around the world capturing the life of cats in various urban and semi-rural environments. One difference with Somewhere Street is that the visual narrative will break the fourth wall and show Iwago talking about and interacting with the cats.

Like Somewhere Street, it's a serene and laid-back travel show that's more about the people than the places. Iwago treats the cats as the people and shows us the world through their eyes and activities. The cats really do start to take on the attributes of fully sentient beings.

Iwago's Cats is one of those NHK shows that makes wonder why nobody's licensed it. The cultural references are all local. The narration is mostly off-screen and (sounds) improvised, so could be easily dubbed (by a cat-loving actor with a mellifluous accent.) But many episodes can be found on YouTube.

Labels: cats, japanese tv, kate, nhk, personal favs, television

Kate's review of Sherlock, the "modernized" BBC Holmes series, got me to thinking again about why I found it so annoying. The casting and the setup is perfect, but the early introduction of Moriarty--a Moriarty of such inexplicable means and motives--wrecked it for me.

What Orson Scott Card says about the "Red John" character on The Mentalist applies here: "He was made too powerful, with tentacles reaching everywhere, so that we began to wonder why he didn't just kill everybody and become king."

Like Card, if he doesn't stay dead (he didn't), I'll stop watching (I will), because "I don't tune in to watch the same repulsive villain week after week. I tune in to watch intriguing and enjoyable heroes" dispose of the bad guys.

I watched the pilot episode of The Secret Circle. It's the kind of show I want to like, but I'll give it a pass. Besides being yet another 90210-with-a-twist soap, the thought of hanging out with the same mean girls and angsty teenagers and evil, Machiavellian adults every week is tiring.

Recall that Buffy was about hanging out with the same interesting, resourceful and good kids and adults every week. The underlying conflict did not depend on Cordelia perpetually being a bitch or even Spike being evil. In fact, the series got better as their characters matured.

The X-Files was big on conspiracies, but structured so that most of the episodes had nothing to do with the big conspiracy arc. They were entertaining ghost or crime stories solved by the odd genius and his level-headed sidekick. Which should also be true of Sherlock Holmes.

And when the conspirators did show up, more often than not, Mulder was caught in between competing cosmic forces. He wasn't constantly being preyed upon, at the mercy of fate or crazies. When he did end up in somebody's cross-hairs, the means and ends justifying them aligned.

Even so, as the conspiratorial twists and turns compounded, it became necessary to explain why the Cigarette Smoking Man just couldn't bump off Mulder. (The Cigarette Smoking Man also showed up in a hilarious episode that explained why running the world is boring.)

The problem seems to comes down to a dearth of writers capable of creating truly smart villains, so they instead create sociopathic and really lucky ones. They turn the bad guys into amoral demigods, and that is surprisingly dull.

This is a persistent problem with superhero series, and one that doesn't need to exist in the first place. As Kate points out, the vast majority of Agatha Christie's criminals are "simple and believable." Their actual crimes are comprehensible in the given context and rather mundane.

Especially when it comes to the police procedural, it's not the crime or the criminal that's interesting, but how the hero solves the one and catches the other.

Related posts

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Labels: criticism, kate, movies, superhero, television, thinking about writing

I've previously noted what could be taken as covert Mormon references and/or jokes in Bones. Kate recently pointed out another one, "The Death of the Queen Bee" (season 5, episode 17).

The episode takes place at Brennan's class reunion. She and Booth are dancing together. She'd like to dance closer, but he's still struggling with his feelings for her, so he takes a step back and says, "Just keeping room for the Holy Spirit, that's all."

Okay, Catholics attending parochial school probably hear the same thing, a testament to the universality of a conservative religious upbringing. Booth, to be sure, is a cafeteria Catholic, but he eats what's on his plate, and his character is written and acted that way.

Kate thinks there might be two writers riffing off each other. Either way, this confirms my belief that an objectively conservative writer will more accurately capture the essence of quite different religious ideologies than all the touchy, freely "diversity" activists.

This comprehension is also demonstrated in how Brennan's rigid empiricism is evenly matched by Booth's apologetic rationalism. This requires an understanding of how the conservative mind interacts with the modern world, rather than the typical straw men.

Mormonism doesn't reject empiricism or even evolution out of hand, and so has the potential for producing C.S. Lewis-type apologists (like my father with a Ph.D. from Caltech). Whatever their religion background, the writers on Bones often skillfully bridge that divide.

The most recent episode, "The Truth in the Myth" (season 6, episode 18), essentially reframes the main argument of The Silver Chair, without Brennan sacrificing her scientific integrity or Booth giving up on faith. It would have made C.S. Lewis proud.

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Labels: kate, lds, religion, television, writing

As Kate puts it, in making Star Wars I, II, and III, George Lucas

wasn't just trying to compete against directors like Ridley Scott and James Cameron (although he was doing that too), and he wasn't just trying to be rich and famous because he already was. He was trying to be THAT GUY again, the guy who came out of nowhere with a picture that wowed the world.

John Polkinghorne, a renowned professor of mathematics and theoretical physics at the University of Cambridge, resigned to become an Anglican priest. In the Q&A after the lecture, he explains (starting at 37:00) that by his mid-forties, he knew he couldn't be THAT GUY again--the brilliant scientist--and didn't want to stay beyond his "sell-by" date.


Polkinghorne also illustrates what's good about term limits and bad about tenure. He did return to Cambridge and became president of Queen's College, but after pursuing a completely different occupation in the real world. The feudal inclination to perpetual self-entitlement reveals itself most powerfully in politics and academia and must be disciplined.

Related posts

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Labels: education, kate, movies, religion, science, social studies

Kate wondered recently why so many time-travel television episodes/movies include a variation of the line: "In the future, I can't believe a B-actor will be elected president!" Okay, maybe writers are frustrated elitists who hate actors, but don't the actors have any self-respect?

Benjamin Schwarz gets at an underlying reason in this article about screenwriter James Cain (simply replace "Los Angeles" with the latest Hollywood gripe du jour):

Just as hipsters today use white pejoratively, denoting sterile, bland, non-ethnic suburbia, so sophisticates in Cain's day enjoyed skewering Los Angeles--[then] America's whitest, most Protestant, most bourgeois big city--as an artificial tropic teeming with displaced rubes, an opinion Frank Lloyd Wright neatly encapsulated in his contemptuous remark, "It is as if you tipped the U.S. up, so that all the commonplace people slid down to Southern California." So conditioned, writer after writer churned out the same derisive commentary on Los Angeles.

Because, as William Goldman observed, "Nobody knows anything" in the movie business, the reflex is to keep repeating whatever worked the last time until it utterly and undeniably fails, and then a few more times after that to make sure. So any "derisive commentary"--any trope no matter how overused--that once went over well takes on a life of its own.

Though it's also the result of the never-ending search for a Great White Menace that writers can mercilessly mock without arousing the ire of the professional offense takers. Add to this the earnest belief that there is nothing worse than having at any time (infancy included) been associated with anything held in high regard by religious conservatives.

The best way to dissociate oneself from the latter is to flock to the former like crows to road kill. Jokes about Republican politicians serve these ends perfectly. Actors willingly diss their own profession out of loyalty to their own ideological beliefs (and, to be sure, loyalty to a paycheck). Though I imagine self-knowledge has a lot to do with it too.

Labels: criticism, kate, television, writing

Kate commented a while back (also here) about what makes a good hero:

1. The hero is confident in a nonchalant way.
2. The hero has a sense of humor.
3. The hero respects women without putting them on pedestals.
4. The hero know himself.
5. The hero is loyal and [can be counted on to] stick around.

I'd like to add one more to the list:

6. The hero is a conservative.

Now, I don't mean in the "votes Republican" sense, though as with Michael J. Fox's Alex B. Keaton and William Shatner's Denny Crane, that can work in the hands of a talented actor, even if he's a liberal at heart. I mean in the William F. Buckley sense:

A conservative is the fellow standing athwart history yelling "Stop!"

The hero knows there are things in life—from the past as well as the present—worth conserving: institutions and relationships, beliefs and traditions, manners and protocols, the way things are simply done. And these do not easily yield to fashion, trends, or political correctness.

The reason that cops, lawyers and forensic scientists populate television dramas is that these professions are inherently conservative. They have traditions and procedures, the scientific method and the rule of law. And following them can at times put the hero at odds with his ideals.

But violating them will definitely get him into trouble with society, the people who sign his paycheck, and his conscience.

For all his free-wheeling ways, House is a tenacious—even fanatical—empiricist. Every cause has a discernible effect. All consequences can be traced back to a set of precipitating actions. "After eliminating the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, is the truth."

And no matter how grudgingly, he goes through channels, even if he has to lie and cheat to do so. He can only do the work he wants to do in the institutional setting of a hospital. Rock, meet hard place. But as Kate puts it, "It actually is harder to color inside the lines." Conflict!

Captain Picard always seems to me to be bucking for a job as U.N. Secretary General. But he does have a irrational devotion to the Prime Directive. Lo and behold, conflict! Though I wish the writers would have made Picard pay a much bigger personal price for this devotion.

Finally in First Contact, Patrick Stewart showed that with the right material he could chew through the scenery like the good Captain Ahab he should have been all along.

No man is a machine. The educated mind wars with mindless instinct. Freedom battles with the rule of law, improvisation with by-the-book, the truth versus the facts, what is legal versus what is right. Perhaps this tension is best summed up by FBI Special Agent Seeley Booth:

I love this country, you know, but I'll tell you something. If I was working law enforcement back in the day when they threw all that tea in the harbor, I would have rounded everybody up and we'd all still be English.

Consider the Stargate episode where the team encounters a Guns of the South situation (in which apartheid-era South Africans travel back in time to arm the Confederacy with 20th century weapons). Except in this case SG-1 runs into them during one of their expeditions.

At first, arguing that sure, they're SOBs, but their our SOBs, Colonel O'Neill insists that the needs of Earth outweigh the moral compromise (the ends justify the means). This creates conflict with Carter and the politically-correct Daniel Jackson, who take the high ground.

O'Neill comes around in the end (there really isn't any doubt). But if O'Neill's initial position isn't convincing made, and Richard Dean Anderson couldn't deliver it in a convincing manner, the drama would have ended up as a mush of shallow moralizing with strawman opponents.

Writers can't fall back on the institutional conservatism and forget that the hero has to internalize these values to a certain extent in order to survive (or become a functioning sociopath, which gives us Dexter).

One reason I think Emily Deschanel and David Boreanaz are given producer credits on Bones (besides revenue sharing) is so they can defend their characters from writers who would try to turn them into conventional liberals who, you know, think the same way hip Hollywood writers think.

It's the "I don't know anybody who voted for Nixon" syndrome (when Nixon won by a landslide). At least this is my explanation for those awful, politically correct scripts that pop up every now and then on NCIS.

But NCIS remains the most popular one-hour drama on television precisely because it gets one thing exactly right: Leroy Jethro Gibbs as the personification of Semper Fi conservatism.

Even a well-defined supporting character can help stave off these pressures. For example, Linda Hunt as Hetty Lange on NCIS: Los Angeles alone makes the series watchable, as an aging cold warrior adapting to modern times but not leaving the past behind.

Danno on the new Hawaii Five-0 is cast as an old school, Miranda-respecting cop there to steady McGarrett's loose cannon (though that looseness is losing me). The original CSI still has one great ace up its sleeve: Paul Guilfoyle as Captain Brass, a gruff, misanthropic, by-the-numbers cop.

Rex Linn fills a similar role CSI: Miami as Sergeant Frank Tripp, but not quite. For some reason—maybe they didn't want him harshing Horatio's mellow—Tripp is Horatio's subordinate. Thus the institutional check is lost. And so it's pretty much all id all the time.

Even if nobody can be too rich or too thin or too underdressed in the Hollywood version of reality—your protagonist can be way too cool to be believable.

As Margaret Thatcher said, "The facts of life are conservative." A hero—even in the most fantastic of fantasy lands—must be a stubborn realist about life and human nature.

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Labels: bones, kate, mckee, television, thinking about writing

Seth Roberts observes that too often scientists publish papers to impress their colleagues, not to advance the science.

Scientists want to be impressive. They want to impress lots of people--granting agencies, journal editors, reviewers, their colleagues, and prospective graduate students. All this desire to be impressive gets in the way of finding things out.

He draws a connection to best-selling author James Patterson, who says of his writing, "I don't believe in showing off. Showing off can get in the way of a good story." It also gets in the way of communicating with the reader.

This New York Times profile of Patterson makes me like him a whole lot--even though I don't think I've read any of his books--because it's clear that he respects his readers and the kind of books they like to read.

If you want to write for yourself, get a diary. If you want to write for a few friends, get a blog. But if you want to write for a lot of people, think about them a little bit. What do they like? What are their needs?

What we like and need is a good story, so much we'll read bad books to get them. And put up with typos and bad grammar to get them. Yet when all the ingredients come together, we can't eat just one, even if they're all the same.

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Labels: kate, mckee, pullman, thinking about writing

I previously mentioned the delightful romantic dramedy I'll Still Love You in Ten Years.

To summarize: imagine that Leonard Hofstadter and Penny (but make her a young editorial assistant) from Big Bang Theory get married. She de-geekifies him, he becomes rich and famous, they end up loathing each other. So he borrows his old professor's time machine and goes back to when they first met in order to break up the relationship.

(Incidentally, I identify completely. This is exactly how geeky introverts think.)

The restrained NHK style gets it exactly right, pushing the physical relationship off to the side and focusing on what makes people fall in love despite themselves, without getting too full of its philosophical self. Ten years ago, it would have made a great Tom Hanks/Meg Ryan vehicle. As a stage play, it'd be a nice answer to Saturday's Warrior.

There's only one small special effect in the whole series--a 1000 yen coin from 2020 disappears when the disrupted timeline is restored. We never see the actual time machine. We're only shown a small theoretical prototype in the professor's lab. It's simply stipulated that the time machine exists.

In other words, it's a magic door. That's all we need.

The "magic door" approach comes from an episode on Red Dwarf where the crew discovers a "space-time portal" that will permit them to travel back in time in order to warn themselves of the disaster that will befall them a few weeks hence.

"What is it?" Cat wants to know.

Lister offers up the typical technobabble explanations of it being a "interstellar dimensional space-time continuum" or whatnot. But with every explanation, Cat only gets more confused and keeps repeating, "But what is it?"

Finally Lister says, "It's a magic door."

And Cat says, "Oh, a magic door! Why didn't anyone say so!"

Call it the Goldilocks problem in science fiction and fantasy: explaining too much or explaining too little. Fantasy with pretensions to "hard SF" often succumbs to the former (Star Trek). A good example of the latter is Jin, an otherwise excellent time travel drama from Tokyo Broadcasting System.


Dr. Jin Minakata (Takao Osawa) is a 21st century surgeon who gets caught in a "time slip" (as it's called in Japanese) and saves the life of Saki's (Haruka Ayase, on the left) brother before fully realizing where he is, and before realizing that he has just done something thought utterly impossible back then.

(Incidentally, Osawa and Ayase also pair up in Ichi, a pretty good Zatoichi spin-off, with Ayase playing against type as the blind-but-lethal swordswoman.)

Following the iron-clad rule that time travelers must travel to interesting times and immediately meet interesting people, as soon as he figures out he's in 1860's Edo (Tokyo), he promptly runs into Sakamoto Ryoma (exuberantly played by Seiyou Uchino, Rika's time-traveling husband from I'll Still Love You in Ten Years).

The episodic conflicts involve Dr. Minakata figuring out how to use his skills with mid-19th century technology. Though Japan had yet to go through its industrial revolution, it still had some of the best specialty steel, silk and ceramics makers in the world. So Minakata could have many of his surgical instruments custom made.

He next sets out to invent penicillin. Granted, the most drastic improvements in health over the past two centuries came from public sanitation. But the Edo government was about to collapse, so a major public works project wasn't in the cards. It's a clever choice, as is having a soy sauce factory handle the mass production.

Although the plots have to be manhandled a bit to set up the medical case for each episode, they're well-researched (at least I found them convincing) and completely fascinating. It makes for a good basic course in pharmacology and emergency medicine. I'd like to see what Dr. House could do in a Civil War-era hospital with 21st century knowledge.

The series conflict involves Minakata's 21st century fiancee, who is in a coma after an operation he convinced her to undergo. He has a photograph of the two of them, taken at her bedside. As he begins to treat one particular patient (the geisha on the right, who's the splitting image of his fiance), the photograph begins to change.

In time, his fiance appears to return to health. And then starts to disappear. Minakata concludes that if he cures his patient, a series of cause and effect will cause her to vanish from history. Add to this his knowledge that Ryoma was assassinated in 1867. Does he act in the present or preserve the future he knows?

It's an interesting set of conflicts and dramatically very well done. There's only one problem with the series: there's no magic door.

A magic door is vaguely implied in the pilot episode. But later, what was implied doesn't seem to exist. The premise gets shuffled off stage with a bunch of literary handwaves and pretty cinematic flourishes and a WTF metaphor about a fetus in a bottle that never made any sense (I don't think it made any sense to the director either).

Maybe Minakata hit his head and he's the one in the coma. Maybe he's not a man dreaming he's a butterfly, but a butterfly dreaming he's a man. Whatever. However clever it looks on paper, this "We're too good for concrete fantasy" business gets my goat. My magical realism better have magic. If here be dragons, I expect real dragons.

Though in this case I suspect they're trying to keep all their options open by not committing to any one plot device. Unfortunately, when it comes to the integrity of a narrative, that kind of halfheartedness never serves storytelling well.

The series is good enough that you can answer their hand wave with one of your own and keep watching. But lacking a physical hook on which to hang the premise--an earthquake, say, or an errant MRI machine--despite the satisfying conclusion, the protagonist's lack of other options detracts from the dramatic impact.

Perhaps the manga on which the television series was based handles it differently. And because most series television in Japan consists of a dozen episodes and that's it (or a dozen episodes a year, very frustrating with ongoing series), it's possible they could come back for a season two (and TBS has just announced there will be).

But they'd still have to come up with a magic door.

Labels: criticism, introversion, japan, japanese tv, japanese tv reviews, kate, magic, sakamoto, science fiction, television, television reviews, thinking about writing

At first glance, Lie to Me and The Mentalist seem complementary opposites, the former left-brained and "scientific," the latter right-brained and instinctual. In fact, the "science" is sketchy in either case. They're really both about emotive superheroes, like those empathic aliens from Star Trek. The true differences lie elsewhere.

I've warmed to Lie to Me as I've cooled to The Mentalist. It took a season of Lie to Me for Tim Roth to figure out his character, for the writers to figure out Tim Roth, and to whittle down the cast and decide what they're doing there. But the improvements have been for the better, and the show's gotten smarter as a result.

A ongoing drama series needs a good thesis statement. On House it's "Everybody lies." On Lie to Me it's "But their body language tells the truth." The clearer the thesis statement, the easier it is for writers to produce good scripts. Unfortunately, the opposite is just as true. The thesis statement for The Mentalist?

Maybe someting like, "All the world's a stage." But the argument is never made or countered. There's no conflict where the conflict ought to be focused.

This made the premise predictable and the casting confused. But Simon Baker fits the part so well I've been willing to give it a pass, just as I stuck with CSI: Miami longer than it deserved to watch David Caruso do his excellent B-movie noir thing. After a while, though, the sum of the parts leaves a rancid aftertaste that's hard to stomach.

There is a point where, no matter how talented, the lead can no longer carry a show past its flaws.

The first and worst narrative mistake in The Mentalist is the diabolical mastermind plot device. The Dark Knight was ruined by it, and Sherlock Holmes and Iron Man II were made lesser movies by it. It's a disease of modern storytelling that makes the villains in hoary old James Bond flicks look good by comparison.

Hey, Hollywood writers, stop trying to remake The X-Files and Silence of the Lambs! You're not smart enough! As a result, the antagonists aren't smart. Everybody else is dumb. Coming up with two dozen strokes of brilliance a year is impossible. The decline of The Mentalist is typical: start smart, grow progressively lamer.

Too many "mind games" consist of little more than baldly entrapping a suspect who behaves more like a badly-programmed automaton.

The inherent advantage of science and medical shows like Bones and House is that there's a lot more knowledge in the world than there are geniuses. Lacking brain power, unbelievable luck becomes a substitute for intelligence, like Lister's "good luck virus" in Red Dwarf. Deus ex machina powers at the fingertips.

My advice is to stick to ordinary crimes solved in interesting ways. When CSI: Las Vegas goes back to the basics--revealing the mundane demons of human nature through empiricism and flashes of insight--is when it gets good again.

The Mentalist also makes the same mistake that Dutcher made in Brigham City. To create an "interesting" protagonist, he placed the character arc behind him. True, too much character arc turns a show into a soap, which is just as bad.

But knowing that down in his psyche resides a core of ordinariness makes a quirky protagonist come alive. Now, as Kate argues, a character can have a static arc that never progresses. Except we can easily imagine Columbo, for example, going home at the end of the episode. Even superheroes have the dry cleaning to pick up.

That's not true of Patrick Jane.  Not only does he have no arc, he evaporates after the closing credits. Based on what the viewer is presented with, his life is mind-numbingly dull and pointless.

Better casting could compensate, but Kang's Cho is the only character who has mental chemistry with Jane, a kind of left-brained Spock to Jane's right-brained Spock. Otherwise, this Spock has no McCoy. He's a House without a Foreman and a Wilson. Sherlock Holmes rises to his best when Watson really challenges him.

Cho is also the only law enforcement officer who belongs in a so-called "CBI."

I expect shows about ostensibly competent professionals to feature them doing things competently and professionally. What's the rest of the CBI staff doing there? CSI: Miami jumped the shark for me when it resorted to moronic malfeasance to gin up drama. The Mentalist has skirted out-and-out incompetence so far, but only barely.

Okay, they hung a lampshade on the Rigsby/Van Pelt romance from the start, maybe to get it out of the way. But professional it isn't. Sadly stereotypical it was. This season especially, Robin Tunney does nothing for me. She's phoning in a Dr. Cutty routine. Aunjanue Ellis (Hightower) outshines her when they're on screen together.

Besides, what does Lisbon actually do other than scold? A smart stroke of casting on Bones was Tamara Taylor as Cam, a superior Brennan has to report to, and a competent medical examiner in her own right (though they have a bad habit of making her play dumb when Booth isn't around so the other squints can explain stuff to her, meaning us).

I'm cottoning to the idea that Jane is the diabolical mastermind, a more sociopathic Dexter (talk about your unreliable narrators!). But that's definitely not prime time material. So the nihilism at the heart of the show sits there, growing stale even as it drags down the drama like an old boat anchor.

A few seasons ago, Bones wandered down the diabolical mastermind path and nearly wrecked the show. The next season they pared down the cast, reaffirmed the premise, and got things back on course. It could be done with The Mentalist too, and pretty easily. But that thesis needs articulating.

Related posts

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Labels: bones, kate, superhero, television reviews

Musing about my musings about how the more things change, the more some things stay the same, Kate asks what makes a "classic" era classic.

Nostalgia is always about forty to fifty years in the past. Forty or fifty years ago, life was perfect! Which is nonsense, of course, but it makes me wonder if, in another twenty years, people will be waxing nostalgic about the 1980s and 1990s.

I think half a century is about how long it takes to take the long view and distill from an era what's worth preserving. Or to put it another way, fifty years is about how long it takes to sort out those cultural artifacts that carbon date the time (like fashion and pop music) from those that transcend it.

Everything else then ends up in a landfill or disappears down the memory hole. As Steve Sailer points out:

The truth is that there is always an absolutely colossal amount of popular culture, the vast majority of which is almost quickly forgotten, except for a tiny fraction that stays in a few influential people's minds and comes to form our heritage of high culture.

So it's not surprising that the things we end up conserving tend to be, well, conservative. Comparing what we've preserved from the past (the less appetizing elements having dimmed with time) with the messy present can't help but foster a sentimentality for the presumably smarter, better, more stable era that produced it.

In Japan, this is epitomized by Edo Period romanticism, conveniently forgetting that the Tokugawa regime ran a heavily-policed feudal state, though one that managed to skirt out-and-out incompetence (until the mid-19th century) and that was quite stable for most of the 17th and 18th centuries.

And more recently, "Showa nostalgia."

The Showa Era (the reign of Emperor Hirohito) lasted from 1926 to 1989. Everybody politely ignores the first two decades. Showa nostalgia instead refers to the twenty years of economic recovery following the war, when everybody pitched in and pulled themselves up by their bootstraps.

This was the time when courageous government officials did courageous government official stuff and weren't all on the take or off starting land wars in Asia. As with the much-heralded era of "lifetime employment," it barely lasted a single generation, and yet continues on and on in the collective memory.

As exemplified in an entertaining example of Showa nostalgia like Always: Sunset on Third Street, the 1950s in Japan was not so different from the 1950s in the United States, except poorer. But starting from such a low point, those years of free, peaceful, year-on-year growth were like a breath of fresh air.

Perhaps even deserving of such rich, sepia-steeped sentimentality.

Labels: deep thoughts, history, japan, kate, movies, showa period, social studies

Over the weekend, my sister Kate's novella, A Man of Few Words, briefly made it into the top 10,000 in the Amazon Kindle rankings, and into the top 100 in the Kindle Regency category.


Granted, the long tail at Amazon is by now so long that this is the result of selling on average one Kindle book a day for two weeks. Moving into the top 1000 would require selling ten times as many. But you never know!

I'd like to see Amazon plot the Brownian motion out here on the long, long tail, and observe how some titles break away while most others sink into (or stay rooted in) oblivion. It'd make for a fascinating bit of visual modeling.

For the self-pubs, just as with the pros, there's an irreducible complexity at work, the eddies and currents of taste and fickle chance choosing one thing and not the other for reasons that can never be completely fathomed.

Consider that Netflix was willing to shell out a cool $1 million in order to improve its predictive movie matching service a mere 10 percent. (In practice, it reminds me of Word's grammar checker: useful but totally unreliable.)

The self-pub hand-wringers are of the same stripe as those who don't trust Adam Smith's invisible hand because they can't see "how it works," because obviously nothing works without an identifiable brain trust behind it.

Study a little physics, though, and you must quickly come to terms with the fact that the world continues to work just fine even when it is completely incomprehensible.

Labels: books, business, kate, kindle, netflix, publishing

My sister Kate has been discussing (part I part II ) the problem Hollywood has getting introversion right. Lately, though, in a few certain cases, it's at least been getting it less wrong. This dialog from NCIS perfectly sums up how extroverts misunderstand introverts:

CGIS Special Agent Borin: So what's your beef Gibbs? That I'm Coast Guard, that I'm a woman or that I managed to get the drop on you in that house?

NCIS Special Agent Gibbs: I don't know you.

That is exactly my reaction when strangers barge into my personal space with an assumed sense of instant familiarity: I don't know you. Don't presume that you know me.

Gibbs is a classic introvert. That business about him spending all of his free time down in the basement with his boat—perfectly content holed up in his cave—is such an introvert thing (and not because the introvert in question is lonely or depressed or otherwise psychologically impaired).

Women assume he's an alpha male extrovert. What they get is an alpha male introvert. For Gibbs, trying to "build" a new relationship just isn't worth it. He's a Darcy (or Seeley Booth), and if they're not Elizabeth Bennet (or Temperance Brennan), they're never cracking that shell.

Granted, this is a way of showing that Gibbs is "damaged goods." Otherwise he'd be like, well, DiNozzo. But that only proves the point. As C.S. Lewis has observed, the desire for solitude has become, in the modern world, a malady that must be "cured."

DiNozzo, in contrast, behaves like an extrovert and McGee behaves like an introvert, but as Kate points out, neither really is. (I don't know whether this is a purposeful mistake or not). My term for McGee is unselfconscious nerd. There's a big difference.

(David, by the way, is Gibbs's id, which I think is done brilliantly.)

Because extroverts, in Rauch's words, "have little or no grasp of introversion," they define introversion in terms of what they observe introverts doing (especially if it runs counter to their own tastes). And then treat that behavior as a marker for introversion in general.

The best example of this is Sheldon on Big Bang Theory. (This series is so right in so many ways I have to believe one of the producers is writing what he knows, or is an extraordinarily skilled observer.)

Leonard, Sheldon's roommate and fellow physicist, is a frustrated introvert who fancies being "cured." Because Leonard and Sheldon share the same hobbies and interests—professionally and personally—extroverts will assume that Sheldon is the same sort of introvert too.

He's not. When the rest of the world is not behaving the way Sheldon expects it to, he berates it and bosses it around, loudly and shamelessly—and often successfully—until it complies.

Sheldon is unselfconscious about himself in ways that make Leonard (or any true introvert) wilt. What is "introverted" about Sheldon—the same goes for McGee—is how he spends his time. As with Darcy, the "normal" interests of extroverts are boring, insipid, and beneath him.

But in situations where Leonard—and Darcy—would suffer in silence, Sheldon says so pointedly and leaves. Sheldon is not a "social" or "retiring" introvert. And not an extrovert. I would call him an "apavert."

The same way an "apatheist" has concluded that atheists care way too much about whether nor not God exists, for an "apavert," the distinctions between "intro" and "extro" are beside the point. The id and the superego are fused into an undifferentiated mass.

Many introverts grow up as apaverts until the cruel, hard world makes it clear that if you're not an extrovert, you're nothing. At which point they develop an introverted shell to defend themselves from noisy extroverts. Or become Garrison Keillor's "Norwegian bachelor farmers."

I am, but remain intrigued by the contrasts, so end up following the advice to "write what you know." The Path of Dreams is one long exercise in making a male romantic lead out of an introvert. And unlike Twilight, my vampires are introverts too. In chapter 28 of Angel Falling Softly:

Wolves lived in packs, far from the madding crowd. [Milada] lived alone, but alone among many. It amounted to more than the simple utilitarianism of keeping her food close at hand; that incalculable need to maintain the illusion of her humanness kept her at once insulated from the teeming city, yet cheek by jowl with the peopled world.

Frankly, it'd be pretty stupid for a vampire not to be an introvert (David Boreanaz's Angel gets this right). No matter how sparkly they are.

Related posts

Life is a sim
Caring for your introvert
Understanding Japanese women (and introverts)
Real introversion versus Hollywood I
Real introversion versus Hollywood II

Labels: introversion, kate, movies, social studies, television