Women's Murder Club

Here is a life-saving tip: The bleak, grey, flat middle of winter is no time for serious endeavour. And certainly no time for serious literature.

One year at about this time I embarked upon What is the What, a terrific book on the right day but a killer at this time of year. The world described therein seemed so relentlessly awful I thought I might as well hang myself. Another year, or maybe it was the same year, I took this time to de-tox, extruding the excesses of holiday spirit, and learned that life without tox is barely worth living.

This is a time of year to eat up Cosmo magazine and any Rom-Com you can find -- does a movie have Meg Ryan in it? Julia Roberts? Cameron Diaz in a pinch? Great! Bring it on!! I am addicted now to W-network, or the "women's" network (the word "pathetic" is silent) and have seen every single episode of Sex and the City and Friends at least a dozen times, have watched Hugh Grant pull his forelock fetchingly over and over again, and have seen so many happy endings I am coming to believe there is no other kind. Desperate measures are required in order to overcome the bloody weather.

The newest entry for the Friday night attentions of single women everywhere is a TV series based on James Patterson's Women's Murder Club books, which I had never heard of until television did them over. I have never been drawn to Patterson and always thought of him as a super-jock in the murder mystery arena. So this chick-lit thing of his intrigued me.

In the TV version, Angie Harmon has the role of the lead woman, Lindsay Boxer, a San Fran homicide detective who takes time out from her intense murder investigations to drink margaritas with her girlfriends at a bar called Susie's or something. Angie has learned a lot about policing from her time at Law&Order; she's good in this role but nonetheless she looks a bit like a man in drag and it makes no sense that we are to believe she's the hot one. Doesn't matter. This is Chick-TV and I'm all over it.

The oddness of James Patterson doing something along the lines of the Number One Ladies Detective Agency series led me to the bookstore, and for reasons of bookstore inventory I have started the series at No. 2, cleverly called 2nd Chance.

It is drek. Funny enough, it doesn't matter. Like bad junk food you just can't stop eating it up, and though the premise falls apart a bit and the big Kaboom of the "reveal" tends to whimper, it does take your mind off the drizzle.

Patterson is a best-selling author and there's no accounting for it really, except that the pages turn effortlessly which is, I suppose, what it takes to sell that many books. He is no writer. For example, he doesn't dally with explaining much -- we learn that the four women of the "club" (Boxer, a detective; a medical examiner; an assistant DA; a crime reporter) are "like sisters" because they keep saying so. So much for character development.

Patterson is such a clumsy writer it sort of makes writing look super-easy, in the way an abstract painting can look like something your kid could do. Except your kid didn't do it, and if given the chance to try you would discover that actually, your kid can't do it. I thought briefly, before I became engrossed in it, that really, I should just write one of these things myself. I know I can't.

Patterson is doing what I could not do myself. His dopey Murder Club is capable of being entertaining when it is darn hard to think of a good reason to get out of bed and put your boots on for another slog in the slush. For that he deserves every penny he has earned.

Big Think

Big Think seems like a good idea. It's a facebook for smarty-pants, a MySpace for intellectuals, a meeting place and distribution centre for Big Ideas.

What it actually is, is boring.

How is this possible?

I wonder if this website is simply an old concept hiding behind new drapery. Essentially the premise is, this is where to go for the brainiest new thinking from very intelligent people. That sounds compelling. And yet it is not.

When you think about it, any good magazine is a clearing house of ideas and trends and acute observations; when you Big Think about it, all turns into earnest and academic chuntering on about stuff that might matter but to whom exactly?

A case in point: Why are you a vegan? Oh jeez, do I CARE???

The problem is, I think, and I don't big think, is that these are ideas without the grounding in "why" -- good ideas for most of us, and certainly the most of us that make a website work, become GREAT when they become relevant. Esoteric is merely that; greatness comes in touching the soul, moving the heart, inspiring many other minds to bigger things. Without the grounding an idea is Rapunzel -- something we can see, sometimes, but cannot touch.

I heard about this site from the great NYT, and it was too early for Times to tell if the site was actually GOOD.

In any given issue of said Times, and certainly any issue of the magazine, I am inspired to be more than myself. I'm inspired to think about why 'good' is moral; why those delightful all-accepting totally optimistic souls with Williams Syndrome nonetheless fail to connect; who is really controlling the economy and how. There is a big idea -- blue sky -- and grounding. Perfect earth.

Not so this website.

I believe we are living in a visual age, a casual age, a discombolutated multi-tasking mad-paced dissociated age. We need not just intellect but soul. Ideas and heart.

The idea behind BigThink is big, and beautiful. But it needs to feel as well as think in order to be truly relevant.

That's what I think, anyway.

But don't let me tell you what to think. Check it out for yourself. http://www.bigthink.com/

Good readers

One of my great friends is tangent-oriented. He read Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde while on a beach in Jamaica and then consumed Robert Louis Stevenson from there, drifting to Treasure Island (yes, more appropriate to the locale) and others, and now is on a serious Victorian kick.

Current faves include Sherlock Holmes. Interestingly, Holmes really is a cocaine addict, which seems most modern, and in A Study in Scarlet, the first novel, is devoid of any interests other than those pertaining to forensic detective work.

What's intersting, if it is, is that these characters and others, like little Alice who goes to Wonderland, seem like someone we know. In truth we do not.

And so I picked up a copy of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, to see what really went on there, as well as a few Dickens tomes just to make sure Oliver Twist is who I thought he was. I am going to dip into Holmes as well, insufferable as he seems, just to get to know him a bit better.

The Misanthrope

AA Gill has a poison pen dipped in sulphurous vitriol. And my word he's funny. Yes he says what you would say if you had the courage or the clever or the refreshing lack of what we call "filters".

Read this and weep. With laughter. I did.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/food_and_drink/a_a_gill/article3150287.ece?Submitted=true

See you in the funny pages

It is a rare event to find something laugh-out-loud funny in the business section. In fact, we could suggest it is near never-happens rare.
But, the NYT business section last week had a story about the battle between Jay Leno, a funny man with a late night talk show, and David Letterman, also allegedly funny and with a late night talk show.
There is a writers' strike in the US right now that is threatening the very fabric of the country, meaning that very soon there will be nothing new to watch on TV. Whether anyone actually notices is another issue but it is certainly riling up some people, mostly the writers themselves.
These writers have made a deal with Letterman such that they can for some Byzantine reason write for him despite this strike; not so Leno who decided what the hell, I used to be a funny guy, I'll just do it myself.
He did, and people laughed their heads off; his ratings soared. Letterman, despite the phalanx of writers, was not so funny. Ratings there soured.
What a quandry!! The writers' guilds then went into swift action, saying that Leno MUST NOT BE FUNNY until the end of the strike. He must not write his own stuff, he must sit still and wait for them to figure this problem out. And it is a big problem. If he's funny without them, what do THEY do for a living? My god, is it possible that Leno can DO HIS JOB?? Are writers obsolete? Is Letterman just plain boring? So many questions! So few answers!
So the writers are flipping out. Leno says too bad, seems I'm pretty good at this and I'm going to keep on keepin' on.
Now, here is the metaphysical issue that the writers could do some thinking upon in their newly-acquired strike-permitted spare time: is it the WRITING that is the problem? So, if Leno just stood up and said stuff off the top of his head would that be okay? Is there a difference between what he thinks up and what he writes down? There cannot be...so where is their guild's jurisdiction?
Not to put a damper on a good story. I cannot wait for the next episode.