* My curiosity was piqued today by Gwenda's link to a piece on Aaron Sorkin so I headed over to read the full article. Here's a quote from the man, as he rants about negative publicity for Studio 60:

"I do believe that we've seen an enormous rise in amateurism,� Sorkin said. "One of the things I find troubling about the Internet, as great a resource tool as it is, and as nice as it is that we can all communicate with each other, and that everybody has a voice - the thing is, everybody's voice oughtn't be equal.�

I have never written anything about the show, although I must admit while I was a big fan in the beginning, rather then getting better and better (like West Wing in its first season), Studio has been sliding downhill, writing-wise. (I still think the acting is great - they just didn't get much to work with.) But putting all that aside, this quote is really hard to swallow. Heaven forbid the people who watch television should be allowed to write their opinions about it - to have their opinions noted and counted and out there for the world to see.

I mean really - who are you filming this little program for in the first place, dude?

* Joanna Draper Carlson linked to a piece on the new Batgirl, Cassandra Cain, the other day which has led to lengthy discussions at both her site and the original site (Kalinara's ) on the Cain character and female superheroes in the Bat Universe. I don't want to get all comic book geeky on you (but hell, it's who I am) but here's part of what I had to say at JDC's:

I don't know what the subtle undercurrent is about women in the Bat universe lately - Spoiler gets brutalized and murdered, Leslie Thompkins very nicely ends up becoming a zealous nutcase, Cassandra has to hang up her fetish gear and penchant for saving others so she can kill people and Black Canary decides to be a mom. Nothing wrong with being a mom, but why now? And then the ninny Batgirl shows up for no reason I can discern other than to make Barbara look weak yet again.

Am I the only one seeing a trend here?

It is exactly because I've been reading comics for so long, particularly DC comics, that I am always struck by how silly execs sound when they talk about wanting to bring more girl/women readers into comics. They would do a much better job of drawing them in (and keeping them) if they didn't do such repeatedly stupid crap to the strong female characters they have. I mean isn't it odd that in the Batverse that if you're a woman you get paralyzed and/or die forever, but if you're a guy you heal and/or magically come back from the dead? I mean of all the central characters in Batman's life, Nightwing, Robin (both of them), and Alfred just keep chugging along but Spoiler gets brutalized and killed, Barbara Gordon gets shot and paralyzed and Leslie Thompkins - one of his mother and father's oldest friends - loses her freaking mind and becomes a killer to make a political point. (Oh and poor Cassandra goes crazy and starts killing people too.)

So yeah - hard to be a female fan in DC's world.

* Over in the Science section, the Washington Post has an interesting story about an upcoming book that looks at muscial memory among Vietnam vets:

[Craig] Werner, who was part of a band that used to play at Colorado's Fort Carson base during the Vietnam War, said the issue of music always comes up around veterans. But as he started researching his book, which is to be called "We Gotta Get Out of This Place: Music and the Experience of Vietnam Vets," he found that songs popular among troops in the field were not always the ones popular on the home front.

Credence Clearwater Revival was always popular with vets, as was that old sailor's anthem, the Beach Boys' "Sloop John B." Martha and the Vandellas' hit, "Nowhere to Run," and the Rolling Stones' "Gimme Shelter" were others. As with Sherpe and Sam Cooke's "Another Saturday Night," Werner said the vets often took away their own meanings from songs. The lyrics of "Sloop John B" -- why don't they let me go home / this is the worst trip/ I've ever been on-- came to be about wanting to leave Vietnam.

Werner is also a professor at the Univ of Wisconsin and researching his book along with veteran Doug Bradley. He has written a ton of books on music history and I'm quite interested to see what happens with this one - it's certainly the first time I've seen something like this going into print.

* The other day, Gwenda gave a teaser for Elizabeth Hand's new book, Generation Loss, that has me very very excited. Here's the first paragraph:

There's always a moment where everything changes. A great photographer -- someone like Diane Arbus, or me during that fraction of a second when I was great -- she sees that moment coming, and presses the shutter release an instant before the change hits. If you don't see it coming, if you blink or you're drunk or just looking the other way -- well, everything changes anyway, it's not like things would have been different.

I am fascinated by Arbus lately - I want to see that bizarre sounding Nicole Kidman movie when it comes out on DVD and I've been reading articles about her on the net. I also watched a great PBS special on photographer Annie Leibovitz who was doing work for Rolling Stone back in the day and had quite the crazy lifestyle for awhile. (She toured with the Stones!)

I had Hand's short story collection, Saffron and Brimstone, on my Xmas list but it did not show up. (Can't complain because a crazy amount of good books did arrive.) So I will have to go on a mini Hand kick in a couple of months. I have no idea why I haven't read her stuff before, but I plan to rectify that soon.

* Oh and the NBCC award lists are out. I was with TEV on this one - I really wanted to see Lost Thoughts of Soldiers, and with Ed, I really would have loved to see The End of Mr. Y. Mostly I feel the same way they both do - not very exciting choices all around really. Does there need to be an award for great books that aren't getting awarded everywhere else? (And yes, I was happy to see Tiptree and The Six, etc. But still overall - underwhelming.)

And as for the strangeness in the Critical Mass comments on the finalists posting, all I can say is that the NBCC folks must not have a clue how bloody it can get in the blogosphere. I mean one person posts anonymously about a lack of female nominees (which is true) and suddenly comments are going to be moderated "out of respect for our finalists". Rebecca Skloot goes further with: The National Book Critics Circle is an organization devoted to encouraging and supporting good professional criticism. So we welcome that here. But good criticism is neither anonymous nor abusive. Therefore, we will delete all anonymous comments, and (per our usual policy) we will delete any comment that is insulting, abusive or otherwise impolite. Then John Freeman, NBCC Pres. gets a little catty with this comment:

Hi anonymous. Thanks for caring enough to respond. Here's where we're coming from. It always feels odd to talk to someone who won't sign their name to a statement. Our names are up here -- it only seems fair to ask of you the same. As for a possible gender bias, it's something we think about every time we meet -- but rather than tell us we're sexist, it'd be more helpful if you could point us to a book by a woman you feel we overlooked.

I mean for Christ's sake, could we grow up please? There was nothing abusive about the anonymous comment and yet these folks got their panties in a bunch faster than I've ever seen anywhere. Now they are going to see just how annoyed folks in the lit blogosphere can get because guess what - we are all going to be talking about how immature they are.