I went to the comic shop on Saturday. I've been very good about only going every month or so. I think I have. Yeah, I'm pretty sure about that. And they have rearranged half the store since last time I was there, which made it hard to find anything, plus the aisles -- well, there weren't aisles before, but now there are because they divided the store lengthwise to add more shelves, but there isn't really room so it sorta sucks. The point is that it was hard to even get close to the shelves to look, not to mention half the stock was moved around, so I could hardly even find things to buy. I guess that's good, but it's a little frustrating, too.

The run-ons are due to sleepiness. Don't mind me.

So this is what I got:

• Stranger Kisses, by Warren Ellis. I still haven't read all of Strange Kisses, to which this is a sequel, but I don't think that matters much. This had lots of explosions and perversions and mutations, and that's really the whole point. So I guess it was fine.

• The Thessaliad. Another Sandman spin-off. I know, and I'm not expecting too much from it. But I love Thessaly. I don't particularly love the little midriff-baring top she's wearing in the first issue. She's supposed to look mousy, damn it. That's part of why I like her! Don't make her into another fetish object, please! Apart from that though, it was okay. Hard to judge since the first issue is all set-up. We'll see.

• Too Much Coffee Man #13. Okay, it's not really a comic at this point, but I got it at the comic shop. Haven't finished it yet, but I liked the reviews of wars. World War II: "Very danceable soundtrack anchored by Benny Goodman and Glenn Miller... a riveting array of suplots." Hee.

• Harlequin Valentine, by Neil Gaiman and John Bolton. I don't usually mention the artists, because I am a hypocrite. But this is pretty, pretty, pretty. I think they should have put the afterward first, though, because I don't think I'm the only one who is less than familiar with the characters of Comedia dell'arte, and since that's the premise it'd be useful to read all the definitions and explanations beforehand, instead of afterwards. But I quibble. Did I mention it's pretty?

[triumphant] I have seen "Demon with a Glass Hand." [/triumphant]

You may return to your normal daily activities now.

Um, okay. It actually was pretty good, even with the 20 years of build-up. And with me knowing most of the premise already. So yeay. I did have to curse the editor again -- I understand that they have to cut stuff to make more ad time. Well, they don't "have to," but whatever. I can deal with that. But it'd be nice if they didn't just snip whichever scenes happen to surround the existing commercial break. Grr. There was one scene where Trent and Consuela run out of a room. Then Trent gets shot in a hallway, and the Kyben are all around his corpse. Commercials. We return, and Trent is on a bed in a little room, Consuela is next to him, and the Kyben are gone.

There were a couple of jumps like that. And then the finale, with the chasing up and down stairs and in and out of elevators, was left as is. Or so I assume. There were definitely things there (and in other spots) that could have been snipped with no damage to the story. It also seemed like a little bit of the very end was cut, too. I say again, grr. But even with that, it was still pretty neat. Plus, Robert Culp is cool. Hey: while trying to find out what I missed, I ran across the fun fact that they might remake the story as a movie. Hm. If that happens, somebody's gonna say it's a rip-off of Terminator. And then I'll have to go around slapping people.

I'm almost done with Fritz Leiber's The Big Time. I would have finished it in one night, but I was so sleepy. So I put it down and slept instead of finishing the last fifty pages. Which was for the best, since when I picked it up earlier I had to turn back about five pages because I couldn't remember what happened in the last part I read. I think I was just scanning the words without processing them. And I've read most of the Leiber short stories I got, too. Check me out, I'm having a little 1960's SF festival!

I read Hugh Nissenson's The Song of the Earth tonight. The fact that I read it pretty much without break until I was done is probably a hint that I liked it. Well, that, and that it goes fast.

But it's neat. It's the biography of an artist who died in 2057. In fact, John Firth Baker is a genetically engineered artist, and the book does have a lot of SF background and fun genetic engineering jokes -- there are news stories about the chess match between IBM's "Chess Maven" computer and a girl engineered to beat it. Plans are underway to perform similar modification in order to create a genuis capable of perfecting a Theory of Everything. And Johnny's genetic gift is a secret for a long time, because under the "Created Equal Act" such manipulation is illegal -- except for alterations which increase lifespan, because that's something the rich want (and can afford).

Also in the background are the gender wars, which isn't a metaphor any more. There are various terrorist and political groups proclaiming the superiority of men or wommin. (No, that's not a typo.) Johnny's politically a gynarchist, and for a while renounces his artistic gifts in favor of membership in a Gaian cult. Although that's mostly because he's got a crush on the charismatic guru, Sri Billy Lee Mookerjee. In the course of his Gaian explorations, Johnny spends a summer as a sexual slave in order to pay for the surgery he wants to give him breasts.

But it is, in the end, about art. What the motivations for creative impulses are, how much of artistic talent is genetic versus acquired, and who gets to decide what an artistic work "means." I'll spare you my theories on the subject, but it's a very cool book. And there are pictures! Made by the author, of course, but attributed to Johnny. And several of them are pretty damn neat; I wouldn't mind posters. There are also snippets of poetry and references to works I didn't know about -- I picked up the book because of a fairly glowing review in the Post a while back, and it appears that at least some of the artists cited do exist, so I'll have to look into that.

The review actually made me think that the book was going to be a bit muddier than it was. The story is told in snippets of journals, emails, news articles, and so on, and I thought it might be harder going, but everything's chronological so it's not just postmodern fanciness at the expense of the narrative. And it's Full of Big Ideas, but not in a lecturing way -- things are just tossed out to ponder later. Fun. There were a couple of other books by Nissenson at the Book Alcove along with this one, so I'm probably going to have to check those out.

Last night I thought, "Gee, I keep forgetting to look at the Sci-Fi Channel's schedule to see if they're showing 'Soldier' or 'Demon With a Glass Hand' on The Outer Limits." So I looked, and "Soldier" was on today! And "Demon With a Glass Hand" is on the 21st! The exclamations points are because I'm amazed I didn't check until the 22nd, which would be more like my usual luck.

The point is, I set my VCR and tonight when I got home I finally saw "Soldier." Michael Ansara was in it, which is funny because he seems obliged to be in every SF show ever. Well, Buck Rogers and Buffy, and Babylon 5, plus The Outer Limits, which doesn't start with "B." Oh look, and all kinds of other things, including some Star Trek. Gee, maybe he's just obliged to be on every show ever. He's cool, though. And has a fabulous voice.

It was even funnier because Tim O'Connor was also in "Soldier," and he was Dr. Huer on Buck Rogers. All things relate to Buck Rogers, you know.

But enough TV trivia. Well, "Soldier" was interesting. And a little confusing, because I'm pretty sure some bits were snipped to make more ad time. I'll have to see if I can dig up a detailed synopsis somewhere; there were a few scenes that were never explained, like when the other Soldier seemed to appear in the same modern alley about halfway through the show, and then we cut away, and that was all we saw of that. And shouldn't there have been some set-up for the fact that the other Soldier was able to enter the past? The thing is, it's hard to know for sure if there were major cuts, because The Outer Limits could be pretty strange and incoherent sometimes.

And you could tell it was a Harlan Ellison script, because O'Connor would say "friend" a lot. Not like, "You're my friend," but like "Let me tell you something, friend." I dunno. It's that "trying to sound natural and yet sounding a bit mannered" style. Not that I'm criticizing it, it just strikes me as sorta Ellisonian.

But I feel like I got another geek culture point. And "Demon With a Glass Hand" next week, hooray. There's no way that's going to live up to twenty years of build-up! So I can't wait to be disappointed by it!

Heh: I just heard Letterman refer to the stupid Olympic ice-skating thing as "SkateGate." As a joke. Which amuses me because I've heard people on the radio refer to it that way quite seriously. This supports my belief than in a hundred years, "-Gate" will actually mean "scandal", even though by then no one will remember why. Except maybe a few trivia buffs. And future archaeologists will be really confused because they'll think that the San Francisco Gate must be a monument to some particularly interesting scandal.

Finished The Cheese Monkeys last night, as predicted. About halfway through it became less Pinkwater-y, but only kind of. I mean, if Pinkwater set stories in colleges, you'd expect things to get a little more adult and darker. Right?

You probably wouldn't expect to read lectures about graphic design, though. But there they are. That makes it sound dull, and it isn't, but is is a bit disconcerting. Apparently the author is a graphic designer, and famous (in certain specialized circles) for his book jackets. This one has a cool dust cover, by the way; it only wraps around the front cover so it won't fall off as easily as they usually do. You kinda have to see it.

Oh, you might need to know a few basic things about art to get some of the jokes. It's not critical if you don't, but I think the art classes I took probably helped me in a few spots. Anyway, I liked it; nothing profound but it's funny. It's also fairly plotless and the characters are collections of quirks rather than people. So as I said, Pinkwater goes to college.

Today I started Coming Soon!!!, and got about 100 pages into it. Which is probably where I'll stop. Too post-modern for me. I was going to try to describe it, but the layers of self-referential cleverness are blurring together in my mind. I guess it worked: it's supposed to be a writing sample submitted by a student, and I ended up being annoyed with the fictional author-within-the-story rather than the actual author. I could probably deal if there was a plot at some point, but so far there's been very little. Next.

I've been sick. Sad. But I got a lot of reading done in between drug-induced comas. Yay!

I read most of Why Things Are, and learned stuff. I think the second collection is better, because it's got more odd questions. This one's mostly going over the basics -- things you might have learned in school if you had mildly eccentric teachers. I haven't read all of the special reports -- those are more detailed essays about topics everyone should know about, like taxes and the Beatles. I was doped up on cold medication, and my concentration wasn't up to explanations that were more than a few paragraphs long.

I've read a few of Leiber's and Campbell's short stories. The Campbell stories aren't as spooky as I thought they'd be, which is always the problem when you classify something as horror. But maybe I just haven't gotten to the creepy things yet.

And the main reason I'm doing this update is because I started The Cheese Monkeys earlier this evening. I'm sure the blurbs from James Ellroy and assorted popular authors are very nice, but if I were trying to sell this book, I'd use the biggest font I could to say "Daniel Pinkwater goes to college!" on the back cover. 'Cause that's what it is. It's so funny! Look:

"Majoring in Art at the state university appealed to me because I have always hated Art, and I had a hunch if any school would treat the subject with the proper disdain, it would be one that was run by the government."

Hee. It's completely Pinkwater-esque. Everyone's nuts, the school is awful, the narrator is a cynical loser. There's a much funnier joke involving gratuitous cat abuse that made me laugh and put the book down for a minute just so I could enjoy the gag.

I'm only about a third of the way through it just now, so maybe from here on out it's all dull and stupid. Seems unlikely, but it's possible. I'll probably let you know tomorrow, because it goes pretty quickly.

Well, I had a completely decadent weekend, what about you? Yesterday I went to get groceries. That wasn't very decadent. Except for the mint chocolate cookies, yum. But I digress.

You know what was by the store, right? Yeah. The damned Giant Book Sale of Doom. But there were new signs indicating that it was the final weekend at this location, before it moved to another strip mall. Thank heavens. What was left had been picked over pretty well by this point, but I did find a few things:

• Mythologies, by William Butler Yeats. These are Yeats' retellings of all kinds of classic legends and folk tales. Neat.

• Don Quixote, by Cervantes, duh. I haven't ever read it all, which is a bit embarrassing. I started it once, but it was a copy I'd borrowed and it was a giant hardback, which meant I couldn't read it comfortably in bed, and well... I just gave up and figured I'd read it later. And now I can, so it all worked out eventually. This is a paperback copy, while the binding looks solid, I'm kind of concerned that it may fall apart fairly easily just because it's such a big book. On the other hand, it was cheap, so if it survives long enough for me to read it once, I got my money's worth out of it.

• The Sexual State of the Union, by Susie Bright. She's funny. And that's all I have to say about that because this is a family friendly website. Yeah.

And that's all! That's not so bad, is it? Except that today, I went out with the deliberate intent of buying even more books. Well, I'd been meaning to go to the library and the used bookstore for ages, and I just finished a couple of books, so I thought I'd earned a spree. I was unusually organized about it, too. A little while ago, I asked for some classic SF recommendations from the good people in the Branch Ridellian compound. They supplied me with quite a few names to look for, including Gerrold, Moorcock, Zelazny, Leiber, Sturgeon, De Camp, Pohl... on and on. I'd like to mention that I'm sure I have read some of these authors before. But I read a lot of short story anthologies and so I don't always remember who wrote want. Which is why I wanted a list of people to seek out.

Since that wasn't enough, I also finally remembered to write out my book list. Every so often I find a review of a book that sounds interesting. I dutifully snip it out of the paper, or print whatever I've found online. And then I file it away somewhere and only see it when I'm cleaning, which doesn't help at all when I'm out wondering, "What other books should I get today?" So I sorted through my pile of articles and clippings, pulled out a few reviews, and wrote down the name and author. And I went through my email, since a few people have been kind enough to suggest other books they think I might like, based on my ramblings here. That's so neat. Anyway, I may actually put my to-read list up here somewhere, just because that way I can't lose it. That'll probably be a project for another day, since I've already done quite a lot of typing this evening and now I have lots of books to read.

Speaking of which... here's what I got. First I went to the library, where I found:

• His Share of Glory: The Complete Short Science Fiction of C.M. Kornbluth.

• The Big Time, by Fritz Leiber. The Ridellians kept chanting, "Leiber, Leiber, you must read Leiber," and I'm easily influenced. Okay, actually I'm not, but in this case I was prepared to listen to their advice.

• The Cheese Monkeys: A Novel in Two Semesters, by Chip Kidd. You can't really pass up a title like that, right? Also, there's a secret message printed on the edges of the pages. I'm all about novelty. Ha.

• Coming Soon!!!, by John Barth. This was one of the books I'd clipped out a Book World review of so that I'd remember to look for it. Apparently John Barth is "the dean of postmodern fiction." I'm not sure how I feel about that, but the review made it sound funny.

• Ghosts of Grisly Things, by Ramsey Campbell. I think I've heard of him, I don't know. Apparently this won on a British Fantasy Award, which may or may not signify anything, but what the heck. I just happened to spot it on the "new books" shelf. The fact that he's a horror writer who has enough praise that he doesn't have to resort to the obligatory Stephen King blurb on the jacket seems like a good sign. We'll see.

That was all for the library. Next stop, the beloved (by me, at least) Book Alcove used bookstore. Mmmm. Forty bucks later, I had:

• The Three Swords, by Fritz Leiber, and also a "best of" collection. The Three Swords is a one volume collection of the first three Fafhrd & Grey Mouser books. Which I've heard about endlessly. Leiber invented sword & sorcery in those books. But I've been told that I'd like them anyway.

• Alone Against Tomorrow, by Harlan Ellison. I've read this before, and I have some of the stories in other collections. But I don't have all them, and sometimes I'm obsessive.

• Why Things Are, by Joel Achenbach. "Why Things Are" was a very neat syndicated column that the Post used to run. People would send in various questions, and he'd answer them. It would just be a trivia book (not that there's anything wrong with that) but Achenbach is also a very funny writer. I have the second volume of the collected columns, but had a lot of trouble finding the first. Flipping to a couple of random pages, I see topics like, why did the Communist world collapse, why do people give fruitcakes for Christmas even though everyone hates fruitcake, and why did Prufrock say, "I grow old, I grow old, I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled." So you can see that it covers pretty much everything important.

• The Song of the Earth, by Hugh Nissenson. Because of another book review I clipped ages ago. This appears to be yet another bit of postmodern cleverness, so I probably won't want to read this right after Coming Soon!!!. But that's okay. The book is set in the 2050's, and is supposed to be the biography of a "genetically engineered visual artist." I dunno.

• Two, two, two copies of The Wasteland, by Martin Rowson. Which I already had one copy of. It's a comic book "inspired by T.S. Eliot and Raymond Chandler" and is terribly funny and full of all kinds of English major jokes. Which means I always want to make other people read it, but it's hard to find and given past experiences, sometimes I'm nervous that if I lend a book out, I'll never get it back. Now I have spare copies that I can lend out, or give to people, or something, which is neat. I did think that buying both copies might be excessive, but they were $3, so why not?

• If You're Talking to Me, Your Career Must Be in Trouble, by Joe Queenan. I love him. That is all.

Did I tell you that I finally finished Gormenghast? Well, I did. And I think there are a couple of other books I should chat about, too, but I can't think of them off-hand, and this is already seriously long. If I think of them later, I'll mention them. Right now I'm going to spend fifteen minutes agonizing over which book to read first, and then I'm going to dive in. Whee!

I had trouble sleeping last week. January tends to screw up my sleep-cycle for some reason; all month I've been keeping kooky hours. So after some pointless tossing around in bed one night, I got up and turned to the internet to relieve my boredom. As part of some kind of stream-of-consciousness activity, I started checking out cheap DVDs. Didn't see anything that I felt a desperate desire for, which was for the best. But that got me thinking about what movies and shows I want to get copies of, and don't have.

Dennis Potter's The Singing Detective has been on my "stuff I want" list for years and years. I'll get to why a little further on. But nobody loves me enough to buy it for me. Plus it's like $60 bucks, which is why I haven't just picked it up myself. And lately when I've thought of buying it, I've hesitated because at this point, my purchase will be the final trigger that causes some MBA to say, "Hey, we should put this out on DVD." Which would vex me. Of course, if I don't buy it, it'll never come out on DVD. Growl. Yeah, yeah, you want a point. I'm getting there.

So, in my idleness, I thought I'd run a Google search on it. Sadly, even in the virtual world, full of people who love to jabber on about television shows, there aren't many sites that mention The Singing Detective. The fact that the only site devoted to a detailed analysis of the show is mostly in Dutch is probably a gentle hit that I should just get the damn videotapes, because there's never going to be a DVD. Sigh. [2006 update: Since I wrote this, there has been a DVD release -- yay -- and there's more discussion of it on the net.]

But in the course of my search, I ran across this little item: Mel Gibson wants to turn it into a movie. And he wants Robert Downey, Jr. to star in it. I don't normally get up in arms about movie adaptations -- I don't care if they're different from the book, because they have to be. I just care if they're good. Which they usually aren't, but they're bad on their own (lack of) merit, not because movies can't tell good stories. So forgive me if I sound like a gibbering fanboy when I say: this is just wrong. This is a bad, bad idea. Now I'll explain what The Singing Detective actually is, so you'll understand. Maybe.

It's not a book, it's a six-part television series that originally ran on the BBC. Then PBS ran it... lord, I don't know when. I'm guessing I was in junior high, or maybe high school. I think they ran it twice, and I watched both times. And bought the script, which was published by Vintage Books. And read it a lot. You need to understand that I haven't seen this show in about fifteen years, and I'm still pretty passionate about it.

Describing the story is going to be tricky, but I'll try. The main character is one Philip E. Marlow. Yes, like the detective, and yes, there's a reason for that. He's a writer. Of pulp detective stories, as it happens. At one point he notes that if his mother had named him "Christopher" instead, he might have gone on to better things. Most of the story takes place in his head, while he recuperates from a severe attack of psoriasis. He can barely move, his hands are arthritic clubs so he can't even write -- he's got nothing to do but think. So he writes a story in his head, in which he is the private eye in a pastiche of noir detective stories. Added to which, we get out-of-sequence glimpses of his childhood in a poor mining town near Wales. Meanwhile, he of course has to deal with people in the real world (doctors, other patients, a psychologist, his ex-wife), and in his delirium the story in his mind and the people around him start to blur together. His gorgeous nurse becomes a prostitute, and perhaps a spy, in a bar during WW2. He worries that his ex-wife is trying to steal the novel he's working on, and that becomes the case that his detective is trying to solve. There's even a beautiful woman, whose corpse is dragged out of the Thames. But because of the ways the stories merge, it takes a while to learn whether that's an event from Marlowe's fiction, or from his past. Plus, some of the characters are equally confused by the way their stories mutate over time, and a few of them set out to have a word with the author. (Hey! Shades of At Swim-To-Birds!) And framing all of this is the day-to-day life in the hospital, with Marlowe's illness increasing, while the other patients have troubles and personality quirks of their own.

Unfortunately, I'm making it sound like another bit of too-clever postmodernism. But the point of all of these interwoven layers is to explore Marlowe himself. Marlowe is... well, he's a bit of a jerk. Very witty, and very bitter. One of my favorite lines is when he's talking to a doctor who makes the mistake of asking what Marlowe believes in. He answers, "Malthusianism," and adds, "I also believe in cholesterol, cigarettes, alcohol, masturbation, carbon monoxide, the Arts Council, nuclear weapons, the Daily Telegraph, and not properly labeling fatal poisons. But most of all, above all else, I believe in the one thing which can come out of people's mouths. Vomit." Needless to say, that doesn't go over very well.

Oh yes, and then there's singing. Did you see Pennies from Heaven? That's by Dennis Potter, too. In Marlowe's story, the characters break into song -- that is, they break into karaoke. They lip-sync to songs from the 40's like "The Blues in the Night" and "Paper Doll." To this day "Peg O' My Heart" makes me think of the show. And again, it's not just a gimmick -- Potter has talked about how he uses the songs because evoke a particular sentimentality, and expose the character's feelings about what's happening better than prose can. But it does make for some very surreal moments as well -- as Marlowe becomes delirious, he sees the doctors and nurses singing "Dem Bones."

But beyond all of the character exploration, I think The Singing Detective is also a meditation on writing -- and I think that applies to several of Potter's other works, as well. Marlowe's illness makes it impossible for him to write, and that enforced hiatus is part of what's weighing upon him. But at the same time, his only relief is writing stories, even if they're only in his head. There is a lot of wordplay in the script, and discussion of what words mean and how they sound. The mechanics of writing appear when characters begin to speak their lines complete with punctuation marks: "Oh comma aren't you the clever one dash exclamation mark."

Now, back to the movie version. I mentioned the first problem already: the series had six parts. Six hours, or close to that, since there weren't any nasty commercial breaks to cut out of the time. How long could the movie be? Two hours or so. I imagine that would mean stripping the hospital scenes to the bare minimum, and without that grounding in reality the dream sequences will come off as twee nonsense: "this guy is sick, but then he remembers some stuff from his childhood and makes up a detective story, and then he recovers." Bleah. Or perhaps they'll do it as a what-a-twist! ending -- "And it was all a dream, after all." Bleah, and bleah again. And the passage of time is important -- you need to see Marlowe's illness progress, you need to feel how long he's spent in the ward -- unless you've had a chronic illness yourself, it's hard to imagine his frustration, loneliness, and desperation to escape, either physically or mentally.

The second obvious problem is Robert Downey, Jr. A fine actor, shame he's such a nutcase, blah blah whatever, that's not the issue. I think it's safe to assume that good ol' Mel wants Downey to play the main character. Who, in the series, was played by Michael Gambon. Gambon is great, he's plausible as a sick and bitter writer, and then shifts perfectly into the Trilby-wearing detective who narrates the story in sardonic noir style. The thought of Downey doing any of that... dear god, I'm sure he can do accents, but the story is British. You could transplant the detective stuff to LA, but the flashbacks to life during wartime are terribly important. It's just horrible to think about. Downey is an attractive guy. That in itself strikes me as wrong -- if you see Marlowe as physically attractive, it's going to complicate the fact that the audience needs to feel some alienation from him. It'll also change Marlowe's interactions with his nurse, who he has a bit of a crush on. She's supposed to be beautiful and unattainable -- if you've got Downey lying in a sickbed, even covered with psoriatic sores, you can't help thinking, "Ah, but she'll see past all that and fall in love with him." That thought shouldn't enter your mind, because suddenly you're rooting for a romance instead of caring about the actual plot.

I don't want to get too grandiose here, but damn it... this series showed what television could do. You can spend more time than you can in a movie, you can use visuals that you can't in books or plays, you can play with the medium and test its limits. And you can be seriously weird. For sheer "What the hell is going on?" value, Twin Peaks has got nothing on this show. Of course, I've warned you about a lot of it, but honestly: it captured my complete attention when I stumbled upon it at age 15 or so because I'd never seen anything like. I think the only show that's given me a similar feeling that I'm watching something Very Different is The Prisoner. Can you imagine making a movie of The Prisoner, with the entire story telescoped into a couple of hours? No, because that would be stupid, it would lessen the story for no purpose, and it wouldn't even give the original show a new audience because they'd be put off by how crappy the movie is.

You can buy a copy of the script, by the way. It's good too, even if you don't get the effect of all the songs. I guess you could hum to yourself while you read, if that helps.