Electrics, Kavalier and Clay, Medium

[poliphilo]

You know what? The problem with the electrics seems to have sorted itself out. I switched the master switch back on the night before last and nothing's blown yet. Mysterioso!

I'm reading Michael Chabon's Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay. It's a text Judy teaches as part of a course she runs in Jewish Science Fiction. In case you haven't come across it yet, it's a novel about two young Jewish guys who get into writing comic books in the late 1930s. It won a Pulitzer- and it's a delight. I  never really got comic books before, but the way Chabon places them culturally- in a golden age New York, against the backdrop of war and genocide in Europe, with Dali and Welles popping in and doing things highly characteristic of them- makes me want to go look at some early Superman and Wonderwoman and stuff.

In the evenings- after Ailz goes to bed- I've been treating myself to an episode or two of Medium. I'm now halfway through series #3. I like ghost stories- and I like it when the ghosts in them behave the way ghosts do in real life. Medium mostly satisfies me on this count- though there's the odd episode where a ghost will do something wholly implausible like grab a guy and kiss him and I go "tut, tut". Medium is fairly gritty- a cop show with supernatural intervention- and Particia Arquette's character is pleasantly workaday- an unglamorous suburban housewife with a husband and kids who are likeable but not too goddam perfect. That's another thing you need in a ghost story- a baseline of the quotidian. Ghosts are all the scarier for intruding in lives that are ordinary and like our own. Mind you, I've seen so many of these things now that I'm scare-proof. They say our culture is in denial about death. I think that's just not true. It was true of the culture I grew up in- the post-war culture of a generation that had seen too much death and didn't want flash-backs-  but things have changed in the last decade. Medium is just one of a huge number of Noughties TV shows featuring ghosts, bloody murders, autopsies, funeral homes and the like- which suggest that we're now as comfortable facing up to the facts of our mortality as any culture ever is. 

Comments

[jfs.livejournal.com]

I really liked 'Kavalier and Clay' - it's tangentially science fiction, I guess? (Being about science fiction rather than being SF itself.) A friend who's an escapologist recommended it to me.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

That's right, I think. It's a novel about SF- and why that particular society produced it. And then, of course, there's the golem...

[jfs.livejournal.com]

I think that the SF a particular society produces tells you an awful lot about that society - the dystopias of the 70s and then the cyberpunk of the 80s are both Science Fiction (whatever Margaret Attwood would say) but are so different in tone and approach that you learn an awful lot about the writers and their worldview from that.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

All novels end up being about their own time and place. That goes for historical fiction as much as SF.

[oakmouse]

Oh, I dunno; I've known ghosts who grab people and kiss them. Depends on the ghost and its sense of humor. *g*

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

The thing is this ghost was so corporeal the guy didn't realise she was a ghost. That stretched my credulity a little too far.

[karenkay.livejournal.com]

Was this the one where the ghost was her brother's girlfriend? I think this was a statement about her brother--he was SO in denial of his abilities.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

That's the one. It was a pretty good episode on the whole.

[oakmouse]

Um, yeah. Not so convincing, that. IME it's more like a touch but no visible manifestation, or visible manifestation but no touch, but rarely both and especially not that strongly.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

Exactly. There are plenty of instances of ghosts being mistaken for living people- but only briefly- and not with them getting up close and personal.

[sovay]

It's a text Judy teaches as part of a course she runs in Jewish Science Fiction.

Oh, neat. May I ask what else is on the syllabus?

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

Here's the description of the course from the Vanderbilt University website.

Jewish Studies 136W. Imagining the Alien: Jewish Science Fiction. Science Fiction and speculative fiction by Jewish writers in cultural context. Aliens, robots, and secret identities; time travel; Utopia and political critique; and questions of Jewish identity. [3] FALL, Klass, J. (HCA)

I know there's a lot of film involved- episodes of Star Trek, episodes of the Twilight Zone, the first Superman movie, Metropolis, Speilbergs AI- and books and stories by Ira Levin, William Tenn, and... and... there I run into the sand. It's mainly the movies we've talked about.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

I asked Judy for the reading list- and here it is:

Required Texts:


The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay by Michael Chabon

I, Robot by Isaac Asimov

Immodest Proposals by William Tenn

The Stepford Wives by Ira Levin

He, She and It by Marge Piercy

The Plot Against America by Philip Roth

The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels

Anthem by Ayn Rand

Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka

[daisytells.livejournal.com]

Being an old fan of funnybooks, starting at about age 7, I think you would enjoy early Superman and Wonder Woman, and other superheroes as well. Topics were timely quite often and referred to current events in the comics.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

I need to do some digging around. I guess there'll be stuff on the Net.

[mariko-writing.livejournal.com]

Michael Chabon is one of my good friends from high school's neighbor. One time she came home and his wife was outside, yelling at a police car.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

I wonder what the problem was. :)