Michael Kevane

I enjoyed The OA immensely, even if at times the show is unsatisfying.  It is like Netflix had carefully analyzed my viewing profile and said, “Let’s make a series that mixes Lost, Arrival, Lars von Trier, I see dead people, Maureen McHugh, etc.” All my favorite themes.  This genre (let’s call it melancholy fiction about our mysterious universe MFMU) always has a problem with endings, and The OA wisely chooses to not have an ending, and instead simply has the series drive away with someone shouting “Take me…!”

Midway through I made the mistake of reading a bit about the two writers, and realized they had cast themselves in the series, and suddenly the acting seemed more like “look at me” and less professional.  I think writer-directors should stay away from casting themselves in the lead roles.

A little bit more editing would have been good, at times a little repetitious. And the show never explains why the OA repeatedly switches demeanor from dysfunctional (when interacting with people) to highly functional (in her “group” of five).

Leslie and I both enjoyed Mozart in the Jungle.  With Gael Garcia Bernal, it is an over-the-top classical music romp of a soap opera.  It really helped that I have started to learn piano and have learned to read music (at beginner level, naturally)… but I find my music appreciation has really changed.

Quartey’s detective series, now in its third title, featuring Darko Dawson is pretty good.  I enjoyed Murder at Cape Three Points.  The mystery here is a double-murder that involves the nascent offshore oil industry.  Lots of nice description of Takoradi, Cape Three Points (I want to live there!), middle class Ghanaian life, and corruption issues.  Brisk pacing, and good writing in the first half of the mystery keep you going.

I do think Quartey could benefit from better editing.  The second half really gets bogged down.  Like many mysteries, this one fizzles out at the end, and is unconvincing in its resolution.

The novel is a good introduction to Ghanaian development issues, though.  Maybe I will assign to class!

Have been very busy teaching introductory econometrics and associated lab to my Econ 41-42 students. Fun, but a lot of work. So many little glitches in R-Markdown. Great, useful program, but bringing students up to speed, and being the one to introduce many of them to the proverbial “workaround mentality” is time-consuming.

Two very light fiction reads in past week: Rick Yancey’s The 5th Wave, and Oliver Pötzsch’s The Hangman’s Daughter.  I cannot recommend either unless you have no alternative.  They were right there on our library’s new fiction shelf, so very convenient (normally I like our university librarians’ fiction reading selections).  Thank heavens I decided to take action and ordered through inter-library loan Kwei Quartey’s third Ghanaian detective novel.  I started it two days ago, quite good.

FAVL received a large donation, $10,000!, so I am ecstatic about that.  Our programs in Burkina Faso and Ghana will really benefit from having these unrestricted funds.  FAVL Treasurer Deb Garvey and I also finally packed up in last couple weeks 8 boxes of donated books, very high quality, and sent them off to Burkina Faso and Ghana.

I skied my first black run (well, just part of it) a couple weeks ago.  Thanks Jeff Schroeder. Very proud of myself.  It is hard starting things like this at 54.  Learning to play the piano actually is almost harder than skiing.  Thanks Jim Nette.  The weather has been very strange in Bear Valley and I am not flexible enough in my schedule to take advantage of some of the “never seen anything like it in 20 years” powder days (the resort uses “epic” a lot), but the coming weeks look more stable.  See you on the slopes!

Elliot for Christmas got Kill My Mother by Jules Feiffer, an interesting noir homage graphic novel, set in the 1940s Hollywood and Pacific Theater.  If you are my age and a certain  income class you probably read a lot of Feiffer cartoons and comics during your childhood.

Another Christmas present was Patience, by Daniel Clowes, who apparently lives just up the road in Oakland.  A good read; science fiction, time travel, melancholia, wasted lives, and that one chance.

Han Kang’s The Vegetarian is a strange tale out of South Korea.  Not well-crafted enough to be high literature, at least not in the English translation, it is still an interesting novel.  It is short, so you lose little by giving it a try.  Has little to do with being a vegetarian, and everything to do with maintaining a coherent identity as a person over time, once the absurdity of our consciousness of consciousness starts to infect your brain.

Whitehead’s novel is good.  The central device of the “real” underground railroad is imaginative and deftly deployed.  The horrors of slavery, the perversity of “benign” slavery, the tenuous freedoms of Indiana, and the interior life of the main character, Cora, are compelling.  Lots of powerful imagery and fine writing.  The subject matter, slavery, needs to be read about over and over again.  Whitehead does a tremendous job of an inherently impossible task: the awful pain of slavery has to be set in a novel where you want to keep reading, not as a voyeur, but as an empathetic and lucky survivor.  He succeeds.

That said, for me some parts of the novel did not work too well.  In particular, towards the end I found Cora’s regular “reflecting” back to earlier episodes in her life more like a novelist trying too deliberately to urge the reader to “Remember that great character I introduced earlier in the novel?  Sure you do, good old Ajarry, you know, the grandmother?”  For all of Cora’s reflecting back to her grandmother, she seemed not to remember that supposedly Ajarry’s cousins were possibly in “the City of Pennsylvania.”  Another part of the writing I did not like was the frequent use of clauses as sentences.  No verb.  Running into the woods.

But what do I know?  The reviews at NPR, The Guardian, LA Times, and NY Times are ecstatic.  Untempered praise.  Resonating with current political events.  Stand the test of time, maybe.

At a colleague’s Christmas party I had met the Stanford University economic historian Avner Grief, and he chatted with me for a long time about the role of clans in China and how that kin culture led to different institutional outcomes compared with Europe, where the limited liability city and then corporation emerged.  So maybe because I had China on my mind, I was looking at my shelf of unread books and saw Ha Jin’s Waiting (first published in 1999).  Something about the blurbs had turned me off way back when.  But I started in on it, and quickly found myself engrossed in the novel, a classic “marriage plot” with a backdrop of mid 1960s revolutionary through 1980s transitional China.  The focus is personal, but there are frequent anthropological-style descriptive passages (of people and their work, mostly).  The China described in the novel certainly could be Europe, so in that sense there is nothing culturally “different” about it.  The novel is quite compelling early on, because Jin takes time away from the plot to communicate the “thinking” of the several main characters.  The protagonist, Lin, is a diffident partner in his two relationships.  His thinking is often confused, slow, and incomplete.  The reader, if like me, understands but starts to get frustrated.  Towards the end the inevitability of a particular kind of outcome gets hinted at, so the denouement reinforces the tone of diffidence.  The novel itself seems to shrink back against a wall… read me if you like, it murmurs.

A nice review by Francine Prose at The New York Times.