Tag: pop culture

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Vineland and the Pynchon Canon: A Critical Appraisal

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Introduction: “The bums lost.” The Big Lebowski: Your revolution is over, Mr. Lebowski. Condolences. The bums lost. My advice is to do what your parents did; get a job, sir. The bums will always lose. Do you hear me, Lebowski? The Dude walks out and shuts the door. The Big Lebowski: The bums will always lose! Brandt: How was your meeting, Mr. Lebowski? The Dude: Okay. The old man told me to take any rug in the house. The Big Lebowski (1998) – Los Bros. Coen In 1990 saw the publication of Vineland, by Thomas Pynchon.  The novel concerned the … Continue reading Vineland and the Pynchon Canon: A Critical Appraisal

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Dollhouse Riffs: Riff #3: “Epitaph One” and the mutability of the Dollhouse Canon

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Los Angeles, 2019: Another ‘Verse.  Another Vision.  More Human Than Human. L to R: Scut Farkas, Little Miss Sunshine, Codex. Apocalypse Now That’s What I Call Entertainment The TV series Dollhouse faces a unique canonical situation with “Epitaph One.”  The episode was produced but unaired, while the series was renewed for another season.  With Season 2 unseen and speculation rife, with a series finale full of cliffhangers and unanswered, where does one place “Epitaph One”? The title name winks at the possibility of the series ending.  The episode’s narrative and setting allude to finality.  Set in the year 2019 in … Continue reading Dollhouse Riffs: Riff #3: “Epitaph One” and the mutability of the Dollhouse Canon

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The Best TV Shows You’re Not Watching

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“I missed the season finale to Dancing with the Stars!  Damn you, crystal bucket!” One of the benefits of the Internet and blogging is an opportunity to write for other ventures.  If you don’t know already, I am also a regular contributor to Blogcritics.org. I recently had another opportunity present itself with the website The Best TV Shows You’re Not Watching. On the Driftless Area Review, I’ve written “Dollhouse Riffs,” essays discussing the more controversial thematic elements of Joss Whedon’s new series, Dollhouse. With the renewal of Dollhouse, I’ll write more thematic essays for Season 2. Continue reading The Best TV Shows You’re Not Watching

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An Adultery (1987) by Alexander Theroux

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Alexander Theroux’s name returned to the news with the publication of Laura Worholic; or, The Sexual Intellectual. The 878-page work can be intimidating to readers, especially those unfamiliar with Theroux’s bombastic, encyclopedic, maximalist style.  A gateway to his larger works would be An Adultery, written more than two decades earlier and less than half the length of Laura Worholic.  The writing is as straightforward as the slip of a plot. Painter Christian Ford loves Farol Colorado.  Farol is married and Christian is going out with Marina.  Complications ensue.  While the adulterous male narrator may be one of the most clichéd … Continue reading An Adultery (1987) by Alexander Theroux

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The New Comics Anthology (1991), by Daniel Clowes (editor)

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A stunning collection of comix, from the punk funnies to foreign voices and places in-between. Published in 1991, the chorus of independent voices range from Harvey Pekar to Gary Panter to Art Spiegelman to Chris Ware and Los Bros. Hernandez. Before the publishers marketed the heck out of the term “graphic novel” and prior to Maus legitimizing the genre to cautious, middlebrow, suburban white people, this anthology stood out like a lighthouse in the storm of Reaganomics, Cold War paranoia, and the tights-and-capes crowd. The ensuing decade has seen these artists become more and more mainstream, which isn’t necessarily a … Continue reading The New Comics Anthology (1991), by Daniel Clowes (editor)

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The Black Doll, by Edward Gorey

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“The Black Doll” is a screenplay for a silent movie Edward Gorey wanted to make. The screenplay itself is a wonderful mishmash of McGuffins, archeology, masquerade, and comic dread. Heiresses, thieves, the Fiend, and others try to capture the Black Doll and the PRO (the Priceless Religious Object). The screenplay, like all of Gorey’s work, is set in Gorey-world, a time roughly analogous to Victorian, Edwardian, and Roaring Twenties UK and USA. Gorey is masterful in his use of atmosphere. Also included is Anne Nocenti’s interview with Gorey. Nocenti worked on “Typhoid Mary” a Marvel comic book villain associated with … Continue reading The Black Doll, by Edward Gorey

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Neuromancer by William Gibson

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This novel made me fall back in love with science fiction.  Gritty future noir set amidst AI, evil multinationals, and organized crime.  The novel glitters with beautifully written passages, amalgamating techspeak with Japanese, Haitian creole, and back-alley slang.  Sure, it’s been criticized as “surface and gloss,” but what surface, what gloss!  When most speculative fiction writers — including some Grandmasters who will go unnamed — became prolific typists with good ideas, Gibson took a well-worn idea (hard-boiled crime fiction), gave it a spin, and produced a spectacular gem. To top it off, Gibson wrote it on a typewriter — how … Continue reading Neuromancer by William Gibson

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The Cantos by Ezra Pound, A Critical Appraisal

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I: The Mount Everest of Modernism “It is not the mountain we conquer, but ourselves.” – Sir Edmund Hillary The Cantos.  Ezra Pound.  The very mention of those names send shudders down even the most well-read literary snob.  T. S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land” seems like a small indentation in comparison.  The only work with comparable difficulty and lit crit caché is Finnegans Wake by James Joyce.  Reading these works carries along serious bragging rights.  “I saw the new Terrance and Philip movie.  Now who wants to touch me?” Eric Cartman said in the South Park movie. As a reader … Continue reading The Cantos by Ezra Pound, A Critical Appraisal

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Dollhouse Riffs: Riff #2: Bodies, Souls, and the Big Bad

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“When you will have made him a body without organs, then you will have delivered him from all his automatic reactions and restored him to his true freedom.” Antonin Artaud, “To Have Done with the Judgment of God” (1947) “The Earth is a body without organs. This body without organs is permeated by unformed, unstable matters, by flows in all directions, by free intensities or nomadic singularities, by mad or transitory particles” Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus (1987) Malcolm Reynolds, Angel, Buffy, Joss, and River In the Whedonverse, there are the Big Damn Heroes and the Big … Continue reading Dollhouse Riffs: Riff #2: Bodies, Souls, and the Big Bad

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