I suffer from a very rare form of prosopagnosia in which every time I
try to picture Mandy Patinkin, I imagine Steven Seagal instead. This has
made watching Homeland a somewhat disconcerting experience. Or at
least thinking about it, I should say. Though Claire Danes and Patinkin
are well cast, I don’t think Damian Lewis or Morenna Baccarin are
altogether plausible in their parts, though Lewis is obviously a fine
actor. (At various points, the script attempts to comment on Baccarin’s
appearance—the daughter can’t believe these are her parents, etc.)
I finished Elmore Leonard’s Glitz recently. It reads very much like a
photoplay wasn’t far from the author’s mind, though I haven’t read
enough of Leonard to know if that is his typical style. A made-for-tv
version did come out in 1988, with Jimmy Smits as Miami detective
Vincent Mora. I couldn’t help but picture Joe Pantoliano in the role of
Teddy Magyck, a rapscallion who shoots Mora and plans to do so again for
the remainder of the book.
In 2004, the first year I had cable television in a very long time, I
watched a Labor Day West Wing marathon on Bravo pretty much the whole
day. I like to think that I loathed Aaron Sorkin’s dialogue before it
was fashionable, and, among the host of platitudinous shitheels and
dim-witted cynicules on display, Bradley Whitford’s insufferability was
truly distinguished. (Veep is almost a perfect antidote for the West
Wing-style treacle, but I think the characters remain too sympathetic.)
So, even though I didn’t immediately recognize him as one of the
middle-managers in Joss Whedon’s and Drew Goddard’s The Cabin in the
Woods, I did catch on and eventually appreciate this ingenious bit of
casting.
The publicity for this book worried me. I thought that some of the
revelations sounded improbable or sensationalist. In just about every
case, however, this worry came from the journalists responsible for
exaggerating or misrepresenting the book. I was promised by those who
had read the book already that it contained much that I didn’t know
about Wallace, and that’s certainly true. Max’s sources go far beyond
what’s been published about Wallace and what’s available in the Harry
Ransom Center. It is not clear to me how many of the letters Max
consulted will be eventually made available to scholars, though I know
that as of this June very few of them were in the archive.
The writers of Breaking Bad probably had something in mind by making
Gustavo Fring a Chilean. Don Salamanca contemptuously refers to him as
“generalissimo” at one point, and Don Eliado reminds him pointedly that
he’s in Mexico now in the flashback where Fring’s chemist-partner is
murdered. He apparently had the power to sponsor this chemist’s
education, though I don’t remember if that was in Chile or Mexico.
[Update: It was in Chile.] Fring calmly tells a suspicious Hank Schrader
that record-keeping was not always very reliable in Pinochet’s Chile.
So, what was it?
I have finally done some experimenting with topic modeling. Though there
are a variety of pre-existing packages for this
(MALLET and the Stanford Topic Modeling
Toolbox are two), I used
the R package
topicmodels
combined with Will Lowe’s
JFreq to create a topic
model of some of Marjorie Bowen’s historical novels.
Why Marjorie Bowen? Let me admit something: I haven’t actually read any
of her historical fiction. And besides, topic modeling is thought to
work best on large and distinct corpora as I understand it. It’s not
likely to reveal something about the works of a single author that a
human reader wouldn’t notice. But this human reader hasn’t read them and
was curious to try it out, even on a < 1M word model.
I thought I’d continue my experiments in topic modeling with Infinite
Jest. A twenty-topic Gibbs sampling turned up such free-associative
gems as: {“alarm,” “fur,” “nude,” “matrix,” “rehab,” “warns,” “hallway,”
“underwear,” “hispanic,” “beach”}, which I’d argue is a pretty good
thematic summary. (I especially love that “matrix” showed up there;
bless the randomized oracular algorithm and its serendipitous
discoveries.)
Anyway, the full list is below. Sorry for the formatting.
I have recently caught up with Breaking Bad, which seems to be
everyone’s favorite television show these days. And like most people, I
have enjoyed it a lot. I think it’s fair to say, however, that it
strains suspension of disbelief in many ways.
For instance, in the first season, Walter sends Jesse to meet with a
violent meth distributor named Tuco Salamanca. Jesse loses both the meth
and some blood. After Walter visits him in the hospital, he devises a
plan to get their money back and establish a working relationship with
Tuco. He goes to Tuco’s office and brings him what appears to be another
bag of their product. Previously, Tuco crushed some of the crystal with
an imposing knife and snorted it off the blade—with brio. This time,
however, he merely scrutinizes one of the shards. He hands it back to
Walter and asks him what makes him think the outcome is going to be any
different this time. Walter tells him that what he was holding isn’t
meth and throws the crystal down, creating an impressive explosion.
(“Fulminated mercury” is what it turns out to be.) Now, if Tuco had
followed his normal pattern and crushed the shard with his knife, the
resulting explosion would have killed him. Walter himself would almost
certainly die in the aftermath.
I believe that the following scenario is comparatively rare in science
fiction: humanity has developed viable interstellar travel and has
discovered habitable planets but has not colonized any of them because
of a static social structure. The social stasis of Jack Vance’s To Live
Forever has been produced by a combination of artificial intelligence
central planning and population control. A relatively small geographic
region of a future Earth has sealed itself off from barbarous tribes and
has separated its population into strict castes: brood, wedge, third
(arrant), verge, and amaranth. Each caste provides a slight extension of
life-span, which is constantly adjusted by a computer to maintain the
desired ratio. The quantity in each “phlye,” as they are called, is
strictly controlled. So whenever someone achieves the next status, which
is awarded by the Actuarian’s estimation of their contributions to
commonweal, a certain amount of those in the lower castes are visited by
assassins. The upward progress is referred to as “striving,” and the
rate of increase as “slope.” Once members of the community (which is
called Clarges) achieve amaranth, they become immortal. Scientists had
discovered how to preserve human life forever, and this social structure
evolved as the only way to prevent violent revolution from below, as
before only the very wealthy and privileged had access to the
life-extending technology.