Yesterday morning we were greeted by pea soup. The kind of thick fog that we never get around here. On occasion, we’ll see fog down along the interstate corridor, or maybe in the trees, but yesterday is was so dense I couldn’t see more than ten or twenty feet ahead.
I finished NOS4A2 by Joe Hill (review forthcoming) and started The Redeemer by Jo Nesbø. The English translations of his books are coming out in somewhat random order. First there was The Snowman, then Phantom, which are in somewhat chronological order (though there’s a significant gap between them because I missed one book, apparently). This new book is from before The Snowman, so it feels like a prequel.
I can’t remember ever being taken over by a short story quite like what’s happened to me in the past few days. I had all but given up on getting something written for the forthcoming MWA anthology. I played around with a number of ideas, but nothing went anywhere. Then an opening scene materialized in my head yesterday morning. I wrote it—it amounted to about 400 words. Then I went back and rewrote it to change the perspective from that of the protagonist to that of the antagonist. That gave me some more freedom with the story and I had a vague idea of where it was going. Then it was time for some period research, so I watched Funeral in Berlin, which is the second of the Harry Palmer movies based on Len Deighton’s novels (The Ipcress File was the first), starring the always rock solid Michael Caine. The film is set in Berlin in 1966, after the wall was constructed. Palmer is MI5 and he’s in Berlin to investigate the possible defection of the guy in charge of security for the relatively new Berlin Wall. There’s also a subplot involving some Zionist spies intent on getting to a Nazi’s warchest in Zurich before he does. Like many spy stories of the era, there are many shades of grey, and plenty of double-crossing. I see that many people consider it inferior to The Ipcress File, so I’ll have to check that one out. One of the fascinating elements of Funeral in Berlin to me was that I spent some time in Berlin twenty years later, when the wall was still there. I actually passed through Check Point Charlie into East Berlin. Harry, as a British citizen, had an easier crossing than I did.
As period research, it seems to have done the trick. I’m not usually prone to insomnia, but I woke up at about 2 or 3 a.m. unable to get back to sleep. The entire backstory of the focal character in my new tale kept growing in my head. I almost got up to write then, but I restrained myself. I eventually went back to sleep and, when I got up at the usual time (5 a.m.), I went straight to work. By the end of my writing session I had over 2200 words (that’s a lot for me in a single sitting). I’m not sure all of it belongs in the story, but I got it down on paper all the same so I can use it. I revamped the material I’d written the day before, developed the story from that point on, and then jumped ahead to write the ending. Then, after I finished, I realized that I needed to start the story sooner. But that’s for another day.
We watched Moonrise Kingdom on Friday evening. A strange little movie with a host of big-name actors: Bruce Willis, Harvey Keitel, Bill Murray, Frances McDormand, Edward Norton and Tilde Swinton. It’s about two 12-year-old kids who meet one summer, strike up a pen-pal relationship, and promise to meet up the following summer when Sam is back on the island where Suzy lives. Their juvenile elopement causes consternation among the adults (especially his scout leader, Norton). There’s a great scene where they’re together in Sam’s pup tent and they open the zipper to find all these adults glaring at them. Sam closes the zipper again but Bill Murray, who plays Suzy’s father, marches over and simply lifts the tent off them. The movie has a quirky style, with a lot of straight-on camera shots and vaguely stilted speechifying, but it does a good job of replicating what childhood is like. How everything is bigger than big and hugely important. My wife commented that it was, in a way, much like Charlie Brown, except the adults didn’t squonk. I think the part of the morose policeman is one of the best things Willis has done lately (and I do look forward to the forthcoming Die Hard movie, but I’m not sure of the wisdom of calling yesterday’s Fox post-game show the “Yippee Kai Yay” show).
The final two episodes of the third season of Haven ran on Thursday. They were delayed because the second-last episode, scheduled to air the evening after the Sandy Hook school shooting, takes place in a school, and there’s a shooting. It’s a high school reunion, so it’s adults involved, not kids, but I respect their sensitivity. A lot happens at the end and we learn a lot about the Colorado Kid’s parents and who is in charge of the guard, but some mysteries remain and the season ends with a huge, huge cliff hanger.
It’s always a sad day when I have to delete a series from my DVR because there won’t be any more episodes. I watched the last two episodes of Fringe on the weekend and said farewell to an under-appreciated series. It was a relief, though, that the network gave the show a final season to wrap things up. We could have been left dangling without any closure. Where the series was going to ultimately end up seemed like a foregone conclusion starting a few episodes back, so it wasn’t a huge surprise, but there was a lot of business to conduct to get there, and at times it seemed like there wasn’t enough time left on the clock. It was good to see Olivia on the other side again, many years younger than her red-headed counterpart because of her amber captivity. Good interplay between her, Lincoln and Faux-livia, though I’m not sure about the consequences of having the Observers show up “over there.” Of course there had to be all manner of tech-y stuff to get through, and yet one more machine to assemble that was missing a crucial part, but that’s Fringe. The best parts were the one-on-ones. Peter with Walter watching the videotape. Walter with Astrid revisiting the cow, when Walter finally gets Astrid’s name right. Walter coming up with levitating osmium bullets, just because they’re cool. Walter and September haggling over who would go to the future with Michael, the apparent resolution to that debate, and the switcheroo that followed. September’s fate was tragic, but I don’t think Walter’s was. I think he’ll find the future extremely cool, and he would have been bored with a past where he didn’t have all these fringe events to solve and battle. And then there was the little grace note of the actual ending. The picnic scene that resolved without an invasion and the domestic scene that followed. A thank-you letter from the producers on top of another letter for Peter, and the final tulip of the show. I’m tempted now to go back and watch the first season or two over again.
I had an interesting discussion with Charles Ardai about shows of this type, that start off as “monster of the week” series and eventually grow to embrace a mythology. Haven is another case in point. He said that networks tend to favor the monster-of-the-week format because it works so well in syndication. You can pick up any random episode at any time. You don’t need to know anything going in, and you don’t need to remember anything on the way out. However, that paradigm is changing with video on demand, Netflix and boxed sets. People can and do seek out entire series, so serialized storytelling is becoming more acceptable.
