Who is Don Draper?

This weekend I finally finished “The Vengeance” to the point where I was happy to submit it—and did. I had two other stories in the recycle heap so I thought I’d take a glance at them before sending them out again. One of them I was happy with. I touched up a couple of words here and there and got it off to a new potential market. The other was a disappointment. I can’t imagine what I was thinking when I wrote it or when I decided to send it somewhere. It seems disjointed, self-indulgent and severely lacking in focus. I started tinkering with it then stopped–I think I need to start from square one with it. I think there is something there that can be salvaged, but what a mess.

I’m almost finished reading Mr. Peanut by Adam Ross. On the whole I’ve enjoyed the book but it, too, seems to be lacking something in focus. There’s a huge hunk of the book that is only peripherally related to the main story, and it stands there like a brick wall in the way of that narrative. Definitely linked thematically, but, like I said, a roadblock. Reminds me a bit of the way King abandoned his main characters for a few hundred pages in The Tommyknockers.

I downloaded the software update for my Kindle this weekend. It has a few neat features. The one I like best is the ability to create folders (or collections, as they chose to call them). Instead of having page after page of titles listed in the index, I can group some of them together. I have all of the No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency books on the device, so I can put them in a folder, for example. There is also a new pdf zoom feature and links to social networking so you can share passages from books on Twitter or Facebook. Finally, you can choose to share highlighted passages with other readers of the book. Can’t say I have much use for those functions, but there they are.

Wil Wheaton was on Eureka this week as a somewhat cantankerous scientist made even more cantankerous when an experiment goes bad and the anger from killer bees is distributed into all Global Dynamics employees, turning them essentially into Romero-like zombies storming the gates. The only bad thing about the episode was the anticipated departure of Tess, who I thought added a lot to the show. I’m not exactly sure why they brought her back if they intended to just send her away again.

The third episode of Haven was better than the second. At least it had more Duke in it, and I think he’s the best part of the show. Definitely the best actor. I also caught up on the new USA series Covert Affairs and was pleasantly surprised by what I saw. It takes itself a little more seriously than Burn Notice. I especially like the blind CIA agent. I’ll definitely be checking it out again. And Mad Men is back. Yay! Don keeps getting even more and more mysterious, asking his latest fling to slap him around, but then behaving like the better of the two parents to their two children. I think there’s a YouTube clip out there that gathers up all the worst of Betty Draper’s parenting advice. This week we got “ow, stop pinching me” as a reaction to the way Betty handled their daughter’s behavior at Thanksgiving dinner. And Sterling just keeps zinging away those one liners. What a great show.

Finally, we went to see Inception yesterday and I was suitably impressed. It’s the sort of movie that you almost have to see on the big screen because there’s so much to look at. I’m not a huge DiCaprio fan. His character in this movie looked and acted like he’d just escaped from Shutter Island. He has these black beady eyes that don’t betray any emotion, and his face fills the screen like a stone plate. I never get a sense of what’s going on more than a few millimeters under his skin. Yet the movie’s innovation and complexity keeps you involved. Layer upon layer upon layer, so that when it all gets unraveled at the end I almost forget what the top level of reality was. There’s a lot to learn about the movie’s reality, so there’s a lot of information to process, constantly, but it feels rewarding to stay on top of it all, as much as Nolan allows. There’s an interesting essay at the Locus web site that theorizes that the movie is actually a metaphor for the shared dreaming experience of watching movies in a theater. I don’t think I buy all of his arguments (the absence of movie references in the movie doesn’t mean much to me–I think that happens far more often than author Westfahl allows) but the absence of technology (computers, smart phones, even televisions) does make one think. Probably a movie that would benefit from a second viewing.