I won’t say this is a must for anyone who’s head-scratched his way through the Book of the New Sun, but it’s got enough interesting perspectives on what’s “really” going on to be an enjoyable companion to those great, great books.

Borski has read a lot more of Wolfe’s oeuvre than I have, and the parallels he draws between elements of New Sun and the Fifth Head of Cerberus sent me skittering off to get a copy of that collection as well. I always appreciate a signpost to more good reading!

I don’t agree with all of Borski’s theories about who everybody is but it’s nice at last to know who everybody means when they start their beard-stroky maunderings about how Severian isn’t really the protagonist of New Sun. I won’t spoil it. Read The Solar Labyrinth.

Man’s got a point…

Never before have I understood so little and loved so much. The few lines that do bubble up to my conscious comprehension are gemlike and wonderful.

“If there’s anything I’ve had enough of, it’s today.”

Brilliance.

And that’s just the lyrics.

Note to all you writer-types and would-be writer-types out there: if you’re going to make your public wait 20 years or so for a sequel, don’t phone it in.

Not that I, for one, was particularly itching for a sequel to The Eight, which I quite enjoyed when it came out but found complete and satisfying in itself.

All The Fire does is call attention to the flaws that were there but forgiven in The Eight.

And really, really, really—having a character who consciously speaks in cliches for any reason is no excuse to use all those cliches.

George Orwell is retching in his grave.

When it quickly becomes obvious that the set is another character, you’re either dealing with utter crap or potential brilliance. In this case, the latter. The motel room setting of Bug is appropriately clausterphobic and sad when it is just Agnes’ home-and-hideout from her tragic past; briefly it is then a scene of shabby hope when her cracked knight Peter appears on scene, but not much later it is an alien landscape of tinfoil and blacklight bug lanterns that both illustrates and intensifies how far off the deep end these two doomed lovers have taken each other.

Under these strange light occur some of the most amusing conversations about insects I’ve ever heard… what is an aphid.. it’s like a bedbug, well more like a louse, you mean lice? Plant lice. Oh, like termites. No, termites are more like thrips. What’s a thrip? etc. Before long half the phylum has been described, in desperate and frenzied terms; the bug fancier in me laughed even as I empathized with horror.

Also notable is a menacing cameo by Harry Connick, Jr. who is handsome as ever but really quite scary.

This is not a film for everyone, but if you’re the type who doesn’t mind spending a few hours inside a paranoid schizophrenic’s head give this one a try.

This show has never done a particularly good job of really differentiating itself from The 4400 (which I liked a lot), and now it’s just doing a worse rather than a better job with this third season. I’m terribly, terribly disappointed and don’t know if I’ll bother to keep watching. It saddens me because the first season was so very good.

I’ve long known OF this series and once accidentally stumbled across a day-long marathon of this first season, in medias res, back when I still bothered with cable. I had it at the back of my mind (rather a crowded place) as something to check out someday. Then Barack Obama got elected! I then decided it would be a very interesting thing to watch this first season, which I recalled involved a somewhat embattled black presidential candididate, in the light of this historic election. And so it is. I’m only midway through the first season on Netflix right now, but am fascinated by the show both on its own merits and as a lens through which to view what could have been. If nothing else, it may be an argument that “experience” isn’t always the most desirable thing to look for in a leader of the free world.

I picked this and Tom Picirilli’s The Midnight Road after I met the author when he visited Cheyenne last month and liked him personally a great deal. I was embarrassed, though, not to be at all familiar with his work and asked him what I should start with; he suggested these two.

Caveat: I am not in the least a fan of crime fiction. I work in law enforcement and have a really rough time when I’m asked to identify with bad guys, even partially reformed ones, which The Cold Spot does. Though I do enjoy a good revenge narrative now and then - The Count of Monte Cristo being a good example - I probably would not have finished this if it weren’t for having met the author and… well…

The writing is awfully nifty. I mostly talked to Tom about other writers we both like, and Dashiell Hammet’s name came up a lot. This book partakes more than a little of Hammet’s taut, tough quality in the prose: no wasted words, no overly ornate sentences, a spare elegance. And so I give it a “worth reading” just for that, because it’s kind of rare and seems to be getting more so.

And if you dig stories about evil men, which I know most of you do, you’ll probably enjoy it much, much more than I did.

That said, I’m going to go ahead and dive into The Midnight Road because the writing will be, I have reason to hope, just as good.

Imagine UHF if it had been directed by David Cronenberg, but with lots of musical/dance numbers. It has that VHF quality in that it comprises lots of odd little stand-alone numbers that are assumed to be common pop-cultural references like “The Mole Brothers” and every little segment has its own stylized logo like “N&T” (short for Notti & Tamafume, maybe the main characters? Possibly? Oh, there’s no point in deciding who the protagonists might be, though this all could be understood as a series of their dreams…). It has Cronenberg qualities in the creature design and the unique ways people interact with these creatures. And the musical/dance numbers are, quite simply, bizarrely enjoyable and kickass.

You’re either going to love it, even as you wonder what the hell is going on, or you’re going to shut it off pretty quick because “The Mole Brothers” are wildly annoying, and some of the creatures are fairly stomach-churning.

But there’s always Tadanobu Asano…

If you have seen this film and liked it, you and I will probably understand each other better than most people do. That is not to say I understood this film entirely - or rather these films, because it’s really a collection of shorts that intertwine in ingenious ways - but even when I was confused I was delighted, entertained, intrigued… all the things we want films for. If there were more films like this, we wouldn’t have/need a drug problem in this world.

If nothing else, this visually impressive hour and change of first-rate disaster porn (first rate because it contains no lame attempt at developing a “plot” or in any way creating a drama out of its scenario) should be an object lesson to us all about the importance of maintenance. Whether it’s painting a bridge or clearing quagga mussels out of the intake pipes of a dam, if it gets neglected for long enough, catastrophic failure is inevitable.

It has been observed that the big difference between the First and Third Worlds is maintenance; most of the imagined cityscapes in the ten- to twenty-years post period bore a striking resemblance to, say, Gorazde or Beruit or Mogadishu (did you know Mogadishu was once considered a beautiful city, a treasure of the African continent? A really long time ago) or Kabul.

Especially interesting was the look at the city in the Ukraine abandoned wholesale after the Chernobyl disaster, a city that has been devoid of humans for a little over 20 years and is being reclaimed by the plants and critters a la Angkor Wat.