This is probably more movie-related than book-related, but I read it over at The New York Times Books page, so that’s close enough.

On March 6, 2008, Tim Arango, in an article titled “Esquire Publishes a Diary That Isn’t”, reported upon a diary account written by Lisa Taddeo for the April Esquire. The article, “The Last Days of Heath Ledger”, is told in the first-person as if penned Sunset Bldv.-style¹ by the recently-deceased star of the modern cinema classics 10 Things I Hate About You and A Knight’s Tale,² who sadly dispatched himself ‘pon the dull blade edge of a prescription drug overdose in January.

As Arango says, this all has the whiff of a gimmick about it, and Taddeo is, apparently, somewhat of a repeat offender in the area of what Arango terms “journalistic stunts”. Amongst other flights of journalistic fancy, she has done a faux article by the real-life baseball player Derek Jeter (”an extended meditation on sports, celebrity and mortality”); a totally fabricated cover story on an invented Hollywood “it” girl provided with the hoax-tastic appellation “Allegra Coleman”; and some fallacious profiling of R.E.M. front man and generally queer sort of duck Michael Stipe, about whom most people would, I’d venture, believe near anything.

David Granger, editor-in-chief of Esquire Magazine, is quick to deflect any charges that the piece on Ledger is exploitative, but rather says that the notion to do it was born out of curiosity about a man who, despite not being a big celebrity, nevertheless found himself on the receiving end of a weird outpouring of public grief over his mysterious and accidental death.

In any event, you can read all about it by following the link that I provided for you above. Mostly, I brought up the topic in order to quote this passage from Arango’s article:

Her article, published in the April issue, which will be on newstands next week, finds Mr. Ledger eating Moroccan food with Jack Nicholson in London, returning to New York and partying at the downtown nightspot Beatrice Inn, eating steak and eggs at a cafe in Little Italy and wolfing down a banana-nut muffin as his last morsel of food.

None of this is exactly true. “The Last Days of Heath Ledger,” written in the first person as if it were Mr. Ledger’s own diary, is a fictionalized account of his last days in London and New York and ponders the indignities of celebrity.

All things considered, there are worse epitaphs. As is probably normal when confronted by somebody else’s mortality—especially somebody roughly your own age and almost, but not quite, as handsome as you are—one necessarily reflects in some measure upon his own, and I simply can’t help but wonder what the diary of my last days would read like.

Just substitute “ate Moroccan food with Jack Nicholson in London” with “stopped at Wendy’s for the $1.19 small chili—was surprised and a little bit sad that it was no longer $0.99—and ate it alone in front of CNN”, and “returned to New York City and partied at Beatrice Inn” with “returned to my Fayetteville apartment and watched Transformers on DVD followed by the special features on disc two—regretted that I didn’t have time to watch Michael Bay’s director’s commentary before I had to return the discs to the library”, and there you have it.³

Okay, well it isn’t the stuff of Esquire Magazine, but it ain’t bad.

First of all, my apologies to the person who has a hold upon Playing the Moldovans at Tennis by Tony Hawks [check catalog]. Yes, I am the selfish person who has kept it overdue, but as you can now see, I had a defensible reason: I was waiting for my hold on Eric Weiner’s new book The Geography of Bliss [check catalog] to trigger so that I could compose this totally indulgent post with both books in hand.

I don’t often get into my personal life on this blog as a matter of self-imposed policy. For one thing, I’m not that interesting, but for another thing, you never really know who is reading. That sounds paranoid, doesn’t it? It is unavoidable now, however, owing to the fact that I have chosen to do a post on two books describing the Moldovan people, that I must reveal at least this small fact: my wife is Moldovan.

You will be forgiven if you haven’t heard of this small slice of a country of roughly four million souls wedged between Romania on the West and Ukraine on the North, East, and South. For the vital statistics, I encourage you to check out the CIA World Factbook, or for a little more, take a look at the BBC Country Profile. The truth of the matter is that when I first learned she was from Moldova, I hadn’t heard of it either, though of course, I researched it and then pretended I had known all along. I can admit this now as a matter of historic record because she’s well aware of my sly ways. Let me give you a short rundown of the relevant details.

The Moldovan people are ethnically Romanian. If you want to go all the way back to the tribes, they were Dacians, Dacia being a province, in the area of the Carpathian Mountains, of the long-forgotten Indo-European Thracian tribes who hung out mostly in Southeastern Europe. Modern Romanians probably owe some of their ancestral blood and cultural heritage as well to the Romans who were fond of pitting their armies against the Dacian people whenever they felt randy for a little wanton rape and pillaging. Well, there’s a bit of simplification in that, but it isn’t as though I’m in danger of being sued for libel by the Roman Empire’s military lawyers, so we’ll just let it stand.

The Emperor Trajan was particularly keen on sticking it to the Dacians; he finally crushed them ‘neath his boot heel around the start of the second century. The comings and goings of those who would plague the peoples inhabiting these lands reads almost like a laundry list of history’s greatest plunderers, starting with the Goths, who forced the Roman troops out around 275, leading through the Ottoman Turks (the Turks were so routinely brutal to the people in this region that Vlad the Impaler actually looked like a good guy by comparison, so what does that tell you?), and eventually the Russian Empire.

The Russians were the ones responsible for breaking off the piece of what was then the principality of Moldavia roughly between the Prut and the Dniester rivers. They called this region Bessarabia; the other half of Moldavia eventually made nice with the Transylvanians and the Walachians in order to form modern Romania. Bessarabia/Moldova was briefly occupied and conditionally unified with the greater Romanian kingdom after the fall of the Russian Empire, though was again annexed by Russia, now the USSR, following World War II.

That is the “for dummies” version of Moldovan history. Moldova has been an independent nation since 1991, though Russia still maintains an ominous troop presence in the region East of the Dniester, despite all international efforts to kick them out. Yes, Russia is occupying territory in a sovereign nation based upon the premise that the Transnistrian region contains a significant concentration of Russians who were left behind with the dissolution of the USSR. Think about that. Try to imagine Russia driving its tanks into Brighton Beach, New York. Darn right we wouldn’t stand for that.

To some of you it may come as a surprise that stuff like that still happens. You just don’t hear about it because nobody really pays attention to places like Moldova. And if you have read The Geography of Bliss, you may be wondering why anybody would want to pay attention.

The Geography of Bliss details chapter-by-chapter Eric Weiner’s journey from country to country as an exploration of the nature of happiness. By Chapter 6, his wanderings have led him to Moldova in an entry he subtitles “Happiness is Somewhere Else”.

Listen, there is a truth in this that cannot be denied: Moldovans have had it rough, and the post-Soviet period has been no picnic even though, as Americans, we’ve been indoctrinated to believe that anything would be an improvement over Communism. The truth is, of course, more subtly colored, though on the whole, independence was—I can probably say—well favored. Of course, those were the days when anything seemed possible, even a long-dreamt of reunification with Romanian Moldova. Most of those hopes died early on the vine of potential reality.

The CIA estimates the percentage of population below the poverty line at close to 30%. Like most ex-Soviet nations, the fall of Communism meant that as everything was once again privatized, a few wily robber barons pretty much made off with everything but the kitchen sink, leaving a gaping inequality between the obscenely, corrupt wealthy and…well, everybody else. Some 40% of the people still toil in agriculture for lack of any other real natural resources, and the average Moldovan earns some $880 a year—gross income according to the World Bank. So yeah, it probably isn’t the most fun place that you could be right now.

And yet, Weiner’s attitude going in still bothers me.

Yes, I need to travel to the dark side of the planet, some place not merely a bit blue, a bit down in the dumps, but truly and deeply miserable. But where?

[…]

Then it occurs to me: Moldova. Of course. The former Soviet republic is, according to Ruut Veenhoven’s data, the least happy nation on the planet. Even the name sounds melancholy. Moldoooova. Try it. Notice how your jaw droops reflexively and your shoulders slouch. Eeyore-like. […] I can even imagine the word “Moldova” doubling as a synonym for generic disquiet.

I know that he is attempting to be entertaining here, but come on—even the name sounds melancholy? I could similarly say something about his last name, couldn’t I? Weiiiiiiner. Just let that play out along your tongue. Doesn’t it sound like somebody who, I don’t know, maybe whiiiiines.

Look, if you travel to a place expecting to find the darkest depths of unhappiness, you will find the darkest depths of unhappiness. Unsurprisingly, Weiner’s journey leads to observations such as the following:

All around me, I see misery. A blind man with sunglasses and a cane, like some caricature of a blind man, hobbling down the street. An old woman hunched over so far that her torso is nearly parallel to the ground. I hear someone sobbing behind me, and turn to see a middle-aged woman with dark hair, her eyes red from crying.

At which point the author questions if he might be experiencing confirmation bias—and this is a good question in that he has described his experiences here as though he had accidentally happened upon one of the lower circles of hell—though he quickly discards that possibility.

On my way back to Luba’s apartment, the bus suddenly stops. The driver makes an announcement—apparently there’s a mechanical problem—and everyone starts to get off. What strikes me is the resignation. No grumbling, no sighing, not a word or a sound. It’s tempting to conclude that the Moldovans are accepting of their lot in life and have achieved a Buddha-like acceptance. I don’t think that’s the case, though. I suspect something more is going on here.

Weiner compares Moldovans to “the poor man in a rich neighborhood”, and so after chronicling what he assumes to be rampant yet joyless alcoholism, a total unfamiliarity with the notion of altruism, stomach-turning cuisine, and even taking a moment to disparage the one export for which Moldova is fondly known—their wine—he sums the Moldovans up as follows:

The seeds of Moldovan unhappiness are planted in their culture. A culture that belittles the value of trust and friendship. A culture that rewards mean-spiritedness and deceit. A culture that carves out no space for unrequited kindness, no space for what St. Augustine called (long before Bill Clinton came along) “the happiness of hope.” Or as the ancient Indiant text the Mahabharata says: “Hope is the sheet anchor of every man. When hope is destroyed, great grief follows, which is almost equal to death itself.”

No, there is nothing I will miss about Moldova. Nothing.

To an extent, this is fair enough. Even the Moldovan people are migrating out at a rate of more than 1 per 1,000 people per year, which probably doesn’t take into account the scads living and working abroad in menial positions in order to provide for their families, many of them undocumented. But still…I am going to go on the record here and say that Eric Weiner is a bit of a prat.

And so as an antidote to Weiner’s negativity, I offer you instead Playing the Moldovans at Tennis by the British comedian Tony Hawks. The plot, in a nutshell:

Hawks has played some tennis, never quite getting anywhere with it, though he did earn “a medal for winning the British Actors’ Equity tennis championship. (Most of the entrants hadn’t been any good, and hadn’t even acted like they were.)” and some other minor accomplishments. So when a friend vexes him by asserting that any natural athlete, such as the ill-fated Moldovan footballers (that’s soccer for most of you) that were in the process of losing to the England team, could probably pick up a racket and give him a beating in tennis, Hawks takes that bet and dashes off to Moldova in order to defeat every member of the Moldovan World Cup team.

Yes, it’s a gimmick, and Hawks is—as reviewers will quickly point out—a humourist and emphatically not a sociologist, and yet, I actually found Playing the Moldovans at Tennis to be the far more perceptive of the two books dealing with Moldova. In part, it may simply come down to the fact that Hawks, himself, spent much more time with typical Moldovan people, whereas Eric Weiner took most of his non-observational information from American Peace Corps volunteers and Moldovan citizens whom he already knew to be angrily discontented, such as an acerbic blogger named Vatalie.

But it also has to do, I think, with the fact that Hawks isn’t particularly looking to prove or disprove anything except that he can beat the Moldovan World Cup team in tennis. He calls it “kind of like a scientific experiment to prove that optimism produces results.” He elaborates in this discussion with Adrian, the teenage son in the family with which he is staying:

‘I am interested by what you are doing in our country,’ he said at one point, grabbing my arm and leading me in a wide arc, presumably to lessen the chances of my falling down a manwhole, ‘but I do not see how you will succeed.’

‘Why not?’

‘I do not think that the players will agree to play you.’

‘Oh I think that they will.’

‘How can you be sure?’

‘I can’t be sure. We can’t be sure of anything,’ I averred, immediately adding, ‘And I’m not even sure of that.’

‘So, why are you doing this? It is a big risk.’

‘Because I want to win my bet and I want to prove my point. The risk doesn’t bother me. I’m a risk taker.’

‘This is bad — to take risks.’

‘Oh I don’t agree Adrian. Not to risk anything is to risk everything.’

‘And what does that mean?’

I’d hoped he wouldn’t ask that. Profound remarks carry so much more weight when left unchallenged.

I won’t spoil any of the book, though I will tell you that it is very funny, and it had both me and my beautiful Moldovan bride in stitches at many parts. Suffice it to say that his whimsical risk brings him into contact with all manner of both colorful and colorless characters alike, including:

• The kind-hearted doctor and patriarch of his host family, who applies his trade for pennies while corrupt goons with idiosyncratic names like “The Television” splash mud upon him as they wrecklessly careen about in their flashy European cars. Though he speaks almost no English, he nevertheless shares a warm kind of friendship with Hawks;
• The mother of the gypsy king, Arthur, to whom Hawks delivers a cheap, plastic round table (this is a rather light-hearted encounter, as she, bizarrely, trades him a pair of underwear in exchange for the table, but in fairness, Hawks tends to trivialize the gypsy royalty, whose riches most probably derive from some rather unsavory practices, such as human trafficking);
• And the absurdly egotistical Russian owner of a Transnistrian football club who paid 25 pounds for a sandwich in Manchester and thinks all British are millionaires, whom Hawks cajoles by claiming an interest in a business partnership to bring a tourist trade to what I believe Hawks at one point calls the worst place on Earth (i.e. the contended and dangerous Transnistria region in which those of Moldovan ethnicity are persecuted inside their own country).

Hawks, himself, eventually leaves the country somewhat ambivalent about it, as an Air Moldova official manages to scam him out of his last fifty dollars as a result of his baggage being overweight.

So far as I was concerned it was a scam, but at least my rather brazen actions had got the price down to an acceptable level. Now when I got home, I could make use of one of the bottles in my luggage to drink two toasts to Moldova — one to some of the beautiful people I had met, and one to the relief of finally being out of the place.

In the interests of full disclosure, I haven’t yet been to Moldova, though I’ve got a pretty good idea about it. If you ask my wife or one of her Moldovan friends, none of them is going to spin a fairy tale yarn for you about their country. But I’ve heard the other side of the discussion, as well, and I don’t think that hopelessness and disregard or even envy for the good fortune of their own countrypeople is somehow programmed into the Moldovan DNA, as Eric Weiner seems to believe. Which is why I am inclined to say that Tony Hawks’s observations are the more accurate of the two, if only because Hawks sees the glimmer of optimism in his dealings with the Moldovan people—an optimism that has merely been beaten down by literally millennia of serving as the red-headed stepchild of Southern Europe. It’s a bit of a revelation for Hawks when he begins to notice it:

It wasn’t until much later, when I finally stumbled into bed, that I was struck by the full significance of what had happened that night. Not only had the family’s plan set my task back on track, but it had been the first time in my entire stay that anyone from Moldova had been anything other than reactive. Up until now I had always been the one making the suggestions, inventing hairbrain schemes or pushing for this or that. Finally someone else had come up with something, and bloody good it was too. It seemed odd that this moment hadn’t arrived until I’d actually given up on things. Maybe it was because this was the first time that I’d appeared vulnerable and really in need, and this was something with which Moldovans could empathise. Or maybe the help arrived because they didn’t want me to fail, and they didn’t want me to fail because they cared.

In the end, it is debatable whether Tony Hawks has anything of great import to say on the character of the Moldovan people, but then again, that was never his intention, and he wisely makes no pretense of having anything other than a comedian’s acute though skewed observations to show for his journey. He more or less ends his journey with the conclusion that “Moldovan footballers are a nice bunch,” a phrase he spells out in all caps as though it is meant to be Playing the Moldovans at Tennis’s take-away mantra, for better or for worse. And as a mantra, it’s not a bad one for a guy like Eric Weiner, I’d venture to say.

Busy. No time for idle chatter. You’ll have to get by on a rewarmed gruel constituted of a month-old article from The New York Times that I couldn’t figure out how to incorporate into a fully-realized post at the time, and still haven’t—I just enjoyed the article.

Like most people, I was made to read F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby in high school. I remember that it led to ample discussion, though I can’t quite recall how it was received amongst my classmates. I liked it well enough to want to keep a copy of it in my personal library—a copy that I would actually look at from time to time—though I think that my enjoyment of it probably derived more from the skilled use of language and the mood that Fitzgerald is able to sustain than from an identification with the themes that it embodies.

A colleague, who once upon a time taught high school English, just told me that in her opinion, Gatsby is a book that “can only really be understood from the perspective of the time in which it was written.” That was, by the way, her immediate reaction upon my totally random question about her feelings regarding The Great Gatsby. The great thing about working in a library is that nobody thinks you’re weird when you ambush them with a literature-related non sequitur.

In her view, the halcyon days of the 1920s United States were so vastly out of sync with anything that came either before or after that those years necessarily exist in their own sort of chronal twilight zone, where the rules and values for living are peculiar. As a result, she said, the only truly identifiable element to modern readers is the notion of an “undying devotion”, which is in truth “not realistic”, but is nevertheless something to which men and women will probably always aspire to either inspire or possess—high school kids even more so, I would venture to say.

In any case, when she taught the novel, she would provide a preëmptory apology to her pupils: you won’t get it and it will probably bore you to sleep, but you have to read it, anyway.

It’s funny, because I would have supposed that anybody who has read Gatsby would probably have some kind of relationship with it—and maybe my colleague’s statements don’t invalidate that. It’s the sort of book from which you’re almost obliged to take something away. So back to The New York Times.

Sara Rimer did an article on February 17 dealing with the current generation’s relationship with the theme of possibility as symbolized or embodied somehow by the green light at the far end of the dock that held Gatsby’s fascination and longing in the novel. Rimer interviewed students in high school English classes at Boston Latin School and nearby Fenway School as a microcosm of young America as they reflected upon the current state of the American dream.

You can read “Gatsby’s Green Light Beckons a New Set of Strivers” here, though I want to post a few pieces that I enjoyed or found interesting.

Some educators say the best way to engage racially and ethnically diverse students in reading is with books that mirror their lives and culture. But others say that while a variety of literary voices is important, “Gatsby” - still required reading at half the high schools in the country - resonates powerfully among urban adolescents, many of them first- and second-generation immigrants, who are striving to ascend in 21st-century America.

“They all understand what it is to strive for something,” said Susan Moran, who is the director of the English program at Boston Latin and who has been teaching “Gatsby” for 32 years, starting at South Boston High School, “to want to be someone you’re not, to want to achieve something that’s just beyond reach, whether it’s professional success or wealth or idealized love - or a 4.0 or admission to Harvard.”

The novel had fallen into near obscurity by the time Fitzgerald died in 1940, said Charles Scribner III, whose great-grandfather signed the author with the family publishing company in 1919. It was revived in the 1950s and ’60s when Mr. Scribner’s father, Charles Scribner Jr., started publishing a paperback version and a student edition for colleges and high schools.

[…]

“I see Tom as this really mean jock,” said Vimin To, a 15-year-old Boston Latin sophomore who is in Kay Moon’s American literature class. “When he was in high school, he was king of the hill. He had it all. He was higher than everyone, even the teachers.”

As for Daisy, in Vimin’s view: “She’s turned into an empty person. Like Paris Hilton.”

Vimin’s father works in a restaurant - “not very glamorous,” Vimin said - and came to the United States as a refugee from Vietnam. Vimin relates to the story of Gatsby’s rise from the backwoods of North Dakota to New York. “It’s a very inspirational tale, especially when you’re from a background such as Mr. Gatsby,” he said.

[…]

“I think this American dream is an interpretation of a white poor man’s dream,” Nicole Doñe, 17, whose family is from the Dominican Republic, said during a lively class discussion. “For me the American dream is working hard for something you want. It’s not about having money. My dream is to get an education that I can’t get in the Dominican Republic, to live comfortably.”

Several of her classmates disagreed. “The American dream has a lot to do with money,” said Harkeem Steed, 17, who compared Gatsby to his hero, Jay-Z.

[…]

“The culture sells the American dream so hard and so relentlessly, but they’re wary, and they should be,” she continued. “One reason students appreciate the book is that there is a level of honesty that they value. They need these honest stories to perhaps balance what is otherwise presented as this shining possibility for everyone.”

During a recent discussion with several other students in Ms. Moon’s class, Will Murphy, 16, whose father works two jobs as a firefighter and an E.M.T., was relating Gatsby’s accumulation of enormous wealth to his own chances of hitting it big in today’s economy. “Getting rich seems so far out of the picture,” said Will, who has a part-time job scooping ice cream. “Everybody thinks about it, but the older you get, the less possible it seems.”

[…]

As a sophomore working to meet the school’s demands, Shauna sometimes feels as if her mother’s green light is her. “She puts all her hopes in me,” said Shauna, who talks about becoming a thoracic surgeon. “I have all this weight and responsibility. Sometimes I can’t live up to it.”

[…]

Jinzhao Wang, meanwhile, has been reflecting more deeply about the meaning of the green light. “I’m not an American citizen, so when I apply to college I will be competing with all the top students in Asia,” said Jinzhao, whose parents are teachers and who lives in the Allston neighborhood, across the river from Cambridge and the red brick buildings of Harvard. “I have to set an even higher standard.”

Here, too, she had found inspiration in “Gatsby.” “The Dutch settlers went all the way across the ocean to this new land - America,” Jinzhao said, referring to Nick’s bittersweet reflections that end the book. “America appears to the Dutch settlers as Daisy appears to Gatsby. Gatsby’s hopes and dreams are American ideals. His effort is the real ideal of the American dream.”

Almost makes me want to read The Great Gatsby again. Almost.

Consider this a thematic follow-up to my earlier discussion of the book Gaming the Vote, in which we addressed the niche movement to revamp our voting practices by phasing out single winner plurality voting.

Obama surges in book sales [read story]
By HILLEL ITALIE, AP National Writer
Fri Feb 29, 3:02 PM ET

NEW YORK - Maybe it’s the prose, or the charisma, or the novelty. But if voter excitement were measured by book sales, then Sen. Barack Obama would be the clear front-runner.

Sales have exploded in 2008 for the works of Obama, the Illinois Democrat who has steadily climbed in the polls all year. Sales have stayed flat for the works of Sen. John McCain, the Arizona Republican who quickly and surprisingly became his party’s presumptive nominee after he seemed finished last summer.

[…]

According to Nielsen BookScan, which tracks about 70 percent of industry sales, combined sales for Obama’s “Dreams From My Father” and “The Audacity of Hope” were averaging more than 35,000 a week in late February, more than triple the pace of early January, when Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton was still favored to be the Democrat nominee.

“Dreams From My Father,” a memoir, first came out in 1995; “The Audacity of Hope,” a political book, in 2006.

Meanwhile, McCain’s sudden prominence has had no discernible impact on “Faith of My Fathers,” a highly praised, best-selling memoir released in 1999, and on “Hard Call,” a book about character in public life first released last August and out in paperback with a printing of 50,000. […]

Weekly sales for Clinton’s memoir, “Living History,” have also averaged 1,000 or less throughout 2008. The book was a near-instant million seller when published in 2003.

Thankfully, nobody is seriously proposing to gauge voter preference in this way, otherwise Stephen Colbert [check catalog] would surely own the Democratic front-runner position¹ instead of a failed candidacy (his Presidential aspirations were painfully dashed in South Carolina last November). So clearly, the entire notion is thoroughly farcical.

Measuring voter preference according to a candidate’s Yahoo! Buzz index, however…well, it’s only a matter of time. Those who resist will be the first against the wall when the Yahoo! Revolution happens.

I tend to watch a lot of incidental television lately; that is, if the TV just kinda happens to be on,¹ I’m watching it. I’m loath to fixate my passive eyeballs upon anything that requires a serious commitment of time from me as a viewer. So like many people this year, I’ve been tuning in to an amount of primary elections coverage that probably constitutes “unhealthy” by most psychiatric standards.

By the way, is it just me or is Wolf Blitzer more or less begging for somebody to devise a drinking game around this whole “best political team on television” thing? Something like, “If Wolf says ‘best political team on television’ twice in one sentence, take three shots of tequila!” Seriously, how many stumbling drunk Americans would there be if that game existed?

Thousands dead of “Situation Room”-related alcohol poisoning. A nation mourns and a beset medical community asks, “How long before Blitzer stops?”

It would be like a national collective bender right on through the Emmy Awards Ceremony that will eventually strip that distinction away from CNN and confer it upon some other news channel so that a new political team can have their chance at beating you over the head with it.

Funnily enough, however, CNN does have a decent political news team, and so I’ve often spent the night with all 360 degrees of Anderson Cooper (to be the subject of my next tell-all memoir The Anchorman Always Rings Twice) and friends.

On Friday, March 7, 2008 (viz. last night), the University of Arkansas hosted a lecture followed by Q&A with Cooper as part of its “Distinguished Lecture” series, so I braved weather that can literally freeze a man’s brain inside of his skull in order to get over to Barnhill Arena.

I’ve got a lot of admiration for the Anderson Coopers of the world, because, man…you wouldn’t ever find me in places like Somalia, where teenage gunmen extort locals and aid workers alike and malnutrition exceeds emergency levels by whole percentage points, or Congo, where one in four children dies before the age of five. That’s why Cooper gets to write a book called Dispatches from the Edge [check catalog] and all I get to write is a blog post called “Dispatches from the reference desk.” For the safety of my life and limb, I think that’s a fair trade-off.

I think the one element of what he had to say last night that most impressed itself upon me is how spotty the record of the suffering is in these war-ravaged and often forgotten nations, even for the people who do most of the suffering within them. Children desiccated by famine—bodies destroyed by rampant disease—and lost to families who haven’t got even a photograph by which to remember them. Sometimes even their names are lost to grandparents who suffer the deaths of more grandchildren than they have fingers to count them upon. Cooper talks of preserving their memories through stories, and really, thank god somebody is willing to take that on. He’s quite a good storyteller, to be sure.

I just got through helping a couple of college kids at the reference desk; one of the young women noticed that I had a library copy of his book sitting in front of me. “He’s so humble,” she said. It’s true—there isn’t anything particularly self-aggrandizing about the man, except to the extent that you sort of have to be in order to become an anchor on a cable news channel, and that’s refreshing.

He is also adept with a sly turn of phrase, which is at least part of the reason why he seems to have won over last night’s crowd, even including the latter-day Holden Caulfields of the University scene whose cynical outrage sometimes swallows the questions they mean to form.

Just for the heck of it, I am going to quote a bit from Dispatches from the Edge and encourage anybody reading this to come and grab one of the two copies of the book owned by FPL. This comes from Cooper’s chapter on Niger:

I close my eyes, pretend to sleep. Maybe I am sleeping. In Africa it’s hard to tell. Coiled in a dirty sheet, sweat-soaked, my hair matted with the day’s dust and grains of sand in my mouth, I dream about work, storylines, plots; I edit pictures in my head. I wake gasping for breath, unsure where I am. Niger. Rwanda. Somalia.

In Africa there are too many pictures, too many contrasts. You can’t catch them all. It’s like sticking your head out of a fast-moving car—you suffocate; it’s too much to take in. Amputations. Executions. Empty beds. Shuttered stores. Crippled kids. Wild-eyed gunmen. Stripped-down corpses. Crashed cars. Mass graves. Hand-made tombstones. Scattered ammo. Half-starved dogs. Sniper warnings posted like billboards. Buses and boxcars stacked at intersections. Old men in boxy suits walking to jobs that don’t exist in offices that aren’t there. It all blurs together. Desert. Mountain. Rice paddy. Field. Farmers bent over. Heads rise as you pass. Eyes follow eyes. Little kids run to the road, stand frozen, not sure if they should be happy or scared. They keep their weight on their heels so they can run back at the lurch of a car, the crack of a shot. Houses, whole towns, nothing but rubble—roofs blown off, walls burnt out, crumbled. Desiccated, eviscerated, gutted, and flayed.

At some point, though, the disorientation fades. You put it behind you; go on. This is an adventure waiting. Life happening. It’s not your life, but it’s as close as you’ll get. You want to see it all.

One minute you’re there—in it, stuck, stewing in the sadness, the loss, your shirt plastered to your back, your neck burned from the sun—then you’re gone, seatbelt buckled, cool air cascading down, ice in the glass. You are gliding above the earth, laughing.

That bit’s got sort of a beat poetry thing going on that some cats might not dig, but in any case, it gives you a compressed version of what it’s like to look through the eyes of Anderson Cooper.

Anyway, if he isn’t quite your speed, but you are fond of the idea of checking out a memoir from a life in news reporting, here are a few other biographies written by television journalists.

• A Life on the Road by Charles Kuralt [check catalog]. Kuralt was the anchor of CBS’s “Sunday Morning”, but was well known before that for his “On the Road” series, which ran on the “CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite”. “On the Road” explored the United States just off the beaten path as Kuralt took the scenic route around the country in a motor home.

• David Brinkley: 11 Presidents, 4 Wars, 22 Political Conventions, 1 Moon Landing, 3 Assassinations, 2,000 Weeks of News and Other Stuff on Television by David Brinkley [check catalog]. Apart from being the designer of the world’s longest subtitle, David Brinkley was a long-time news commentator for NBC. “The Huntley-Brinkley Report”, which aired from 1956 to 1970, pioneered early television documentary techniques, though he is probably most famous for his news panel show, “This Week with David Brinkley”, done for ABC from 1981 through 1996.

• A Long Way from Home: Growing Up in the American Heartland by Tom Brokaw [check catalog]. Tom Brokaw is, amongst other things, known for his coverage of the Watergate scandal during his term as NBC Washington correspondent, and then later for his gig as host of the “NBC Nightly News”. He’s still around and writing books for crotchety members of what I like to term the “sandwiched generation”—you know, those sort of difficult-to-define people who didn’t fight in World War II yet aren’t baby boomers, so they’re kind of in awe of the former and a little ticked off by the latter. His most recent is Boom!: Voices of the Sixties : Personal Reflections on the ’60s and Today [check catalog] which features such chapters as “A loss of innocence”, “The fracture of 1968: the noisy masses versus the silent majority”, and “A dream fulfilled and a dream deferred”. Still a strong voice in the United States media, despite his inability to pronounce the letter “l”.

• Peter Jennings: A Reporter’s Life [check catalog]. Published posthumously, the content is apparently culled from interviews given by Jennings in the years before his death in 2005. I would venture to say that Jennings is best known as anchor of ABC’s “World News Tonight” from 1982 to 2003, though he had his start with the Canadian Broadcast Corporation. He was plucked from the CBC in 1965 when he was still a young stud of 26, and ABC made him the youngest network news anchor ever.

For those of you who would like to know about movies that were based upon books without having to wade through my voluminous prose, the Mid-Continent Public Library over in Independence, Missouri has put together a web resource for this purpose as part of their online Reader’s Advisory service.

They call it, simply enough, “Based on the Book”. Their data, which is culled from the Internet Movie Database, can be browsed by Movie Title, Movie Release Year, Book Title, and Book Author.

Though I intend to get back around to books tangentially further down, I am going to digress somewhat from that subject today, because I can only think about literature so much before I need to kind of deactivate that part of my brain to stave off impending overload.

By the way, my invitation, as always, remains open to library staff members who would like to do a post or posts on this blog. The choice of topic is your own.

Moving on…

I love loud, shiny action films, though I think that I’m generally pretty fair about assessing them. Let the record show that I did take my undergraduate degree in Communications, so I’ve got some film studies under my belt. And as an illustration that my sensibilities aren’t too severely skewed in favor of the loud and eye-popping, I will tell you—honestly even—that to this day Citizen Kane is solidly fixed as my favorite film.¹ Make of that what you will.

Primarily, I like smart cinema, especially when the filmmakers attempt something boldly, and I don’t abide the belief that a film can’t be clever, well-made, or well-acted merely because it involves a chase sequence and a few buildings blowing up.

Your mileage may vary, though I simply wanted to enforce that I’m not like this guy who called The Transporter “the French film that changed history!!” I think that I’m generally willing to call a spade a spade.

So let’s look at the quintessential action film director as an example of how my preferences lie. I am talking, of course, of Michael Bay. This has absolutely nothing to do with books.

Transformers [check catalog]? It’s almost a prerequisite to enjoying this film that you are a male and that you were a child of the 1980s. In truth, it is an ambitious film that juggles characters and plot arcs fairly effectively for half of it’s enormous running time, and proves that Michael Bay can organize a story well when he wants to. But at some point, it’s almost as though he became distracted and forgot about all of that, reverting from responsible director who ushers the threads of a narrative coherently, to the kid who just loves taking all of his toys and violently crashing them into each other while making explosion sounds. Transformers structurally implodes towards the end, done in by its own massive scope and the fact that the filmmakers forgot to design a convincing or explainable ending. A stupid movie all told, though I fully intend to watch it again regardless. It was awesome!

The Island? Now this one was extremely underrated. Naturally, the action is quite literally breath-taking, but there’s actually a smart premise undergirding the journey of the protagonists. It functions well as a convincing science fiction and also as a more metaphysical exploration of what makes us human, with some characters rising above their natures and some falling below even their own maleable expectations for themselves, and with it all reflected through the naïve yet sapient eyes of the major protagonist. Yes, there’s an open-endedness about it, though for once, it isn’t because Michael Bay got bored, but rather because the story compels an untidy denouement that leaves some questions dangling. I’ve never understood why critics lambasted The Island and I suppose I never will.

This has been a long build-up to the following statement: as with most matters of opinion, you may choose to disagree with me. And not that any of this really matters, but I do think about why a film is enjoyable or not, though the extent to which I enjoy it may not always be a product of how much I had to think about it (though having to think about it is generally a positive thing).

Everybody get all that?

Anyway, I’ve been thinking about film in the context of books lately for a couple of reasons. Firstly, my confessed interest in action films means that I’ll typically read the reviews for even the most unpromising-looking entry into this genre, which is how I discovered that the recent release Jumper was actually based upon a young adult book by Steven Gould that came out back in 1992. I don’t know that the book upon which it was based was any better than the film, itself, though I am thinking that it would almost have to be. NoveList will provide some reviews if you’re interested. I’ll provide a snippet from Kirkus Reviews:

Sprightly first novel combining revenge, growing up, lonely-superman and abuse-of-power motifs centered on a classic science-fiction theme: teleportation. Davy Rice, 17, lives with his drunken, brutal father in Stanville, Ohio, enduring physical and mental abuse…

Already this is probably deeper than the recent film. As an aside, one of the reviews for Jumper (the movie) contained my favorite critic quote of the year: “what can you do with Hayden Christensen? He’s as close as we have to an android actor.” That’s from the Boston Globe, and it’s funny because it’s true.

Secondly, the phrase “based upon a novel/story by Philip K. Dick” will often pique my interest, even though these films have been hit or miss for me. I didn’t care for Blade Runner for example, though I thought that Minority Report was brilliant and Total Recall (based upon “We Can Remember it for You Wholesale”) is a fond memory from my childhood. You can pretty much be guaranteed of one thing when you hear Philip K. Dick’s name invoked: it’s going to be weird.

In 2007, one such film sort of came and went without anybody much noticing. I am talking about the Nicholas Cage vehicle Next [check catalog]. In 2006, A Scanner Darkly similarly flew right under most people’s radars. I can’t speak to the quality of the latter-mentioned film, since I haven’t seen it. I have, however, now seen Next thanks to my friendly, youth librarian who picked this one out for the Young Adult media collection.

Next is based upon a Philip K. Dick story called “The Golden Man”. In typical Hollywood fashion, Dick’s story, which you can learn about at Wikipedia, functions as little more than a springboard for its cinematic expression. Probably rightly so, in this case, since Dick can be a bit too kooky for his own good at times. For example, this comes from Wikipedia in regards to “The Golden Man”:

Unknown to them, Cris turns out to possess another power; his golden skin acts like a lion’s mane, and allows him to seduce members of the opposite sex. Cris influences the fiancée into freeing him, then impregnates her and makes his escape.

Dick’s stories are chock full of loopy details like that.

The central concept involving a protagonist who can see the outcomes of his own actions into the near future is essentially the same, however, and that’s the bit that interested me when I heard about it, despite the fact that critics heaped a fairly ample amount of ill-will upon Next, as is their wont when an action film attempts, perhaps ill-advisedly, to rise above its genre conventions.

Let me be clear here: Next is not a great film. Entertaining, surely, though not without problematic elements: for example, the unconvincing romance upon which the entire narrative unwisely hangs, and the non-ending which seems to imply that this was somebody’s extravagantly expanded television pilot.

And yet, I found this to be a pretty good movie. In terms of how the filmmakers explore the protagonist’s gift of precognition, the film is very clever in how it seems to keep ratcheting up his abilities, using them to twist the plot right before your eyes, without ever really violating its own clearly-defined rules. I seem to recall film reviewers claiming the contrary: specifically, that the film can’t remember its own rules. That’s horseradish and simply proves what I’ve been saying for years—these people see so many films that eventually, they stop paying attention.

It’s true—you actually do have to pay attention to this film, and in a paradoxical way, that’s both a fault and its advantage. Basically, you don’t pop a film like Next into your DVD player expecting to have to leave your brain switched to the “on” position. And the lack of care put into the portrayal of the human relationships (which leads to some wooden performances and lost opportunities) regrettably belies how smart other elements of the narrative actually are (though importantly, Nicholas Cage scores a minor win here playing a protagonist for whom antiheroism represents the dominant personality trait).

It’s clear that the filmmakers were more interested in this story from the perspective of thinking about what the protagonist can do, and to that end, it might have made for quite a good television series. As a film, however, it feels rushed, though it is cogent. In any event, it’s certainly not boring. Ultimately, in the aftertaste, you’ll wish that they’d have done Next the justice that the premise deserved by not giving such short shrift to some of the dramatic elements.

Soooo yeah…it’s a fun bit of escapist cinema. There’s an undeniable slickness to the production, Nick Cage’s atrocious hairstyle notwithstanding, and it’s not the by-the-numbers fiasco that some critics would have you believe. It’s got a kind of quirky charm, despite its B-movie sensibilities, that sees it through.

Normally, I would say that enjoyment of a film such as Next demands that you be the sort of person whose ears prick up upon hearing “Inspired by a story by Philip K. Dick”, but then again, my wife also fully invested herself in it (at least until the last thirty seconds), and I’m sure that she doesn’t know Philip K. Dick from Philip J. Fry. Though she did love both Minority Report and Total Recall…so she’s all right!

Bear with me a second. I’ve got a point here, but I fully intend to ramble my way to it.

Back in 2000 there was a television show called “Son of the Beach”, and I can say without a shred of hesitation that it was just about the worst thing ever conceived by Homo sapiens (this latter term being an erroneous designation, surely). In concept, it was supposed to be a “Baywatch” parody.

Let that sink in a minute.

It was a parody of a show that was, itself, self-parody. But “Son of the Beach” was actually worse than even its schlocky premise would imply—it was sort of like the most groan-inducing moments from every by-the-numbers, bomb-tastic teen movie (you know, the ones that come out like clockwork every year) rolled up into one gloriously intentional small-screen throw-away.

And yet, “Son of the Beach” season one (mercifully, there only was one season of this program) rates 4.5 stars out of 5 on Amazon.com based upon 28 user reviews. You’ll find a single one-star rating there. That’s mine. Three of 61 people found my comment helpful. Fair enough.

My point is that people are stupid.

What? Too harsh? Let me put it this way: some people don’t know…uh…Shinola from something that isn’t Shinola. In any event, I know that was a pretty long preamble to such a simple conclusion, but there you go. I assure you that once you’ve read the remainder of this post, you will find yourself even further confused as to why I chose to relate that to you.

I just wanted to share.

That being said, I still feel that the range style of voting is probably one of the more helpful rating systems currently in use. It is, of course, deceptive when the only people voting upon a thing are roundly demented, but provided a large, representative sample size, it bears out pretty well for neutralizing the skewing factor intrinsic to single winner plurality voting. Which brings me to this:

The Math Behind the Vote
by THERESA BRADLEY, Associated Press Writer

“Gaming the Vote: Why Elections Aren’t Fair (and What We Can Do About It)” (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 352 pages, $25), by William Poundstone: Most analysts doubt Ralph Nader’s bid for the White House will divide Democrats and tip the presidency to Republicans in 2008. After all, he received less than 0.4 percent of the vote in 2004, down from nearly 3 percent in 2000.

But according to William Poundstone’s new book on voting, tipping the vote is exactly what Nader has sought to do.

[…]

But spoilers are nothing new, having determined at least five presidential elections since popular voting for the White House widely began in 1828, Poundstone argues. […]

The problem, it turns out, is that neither plurality voting, nor any other known method, is entirely fair. This depressing notion was proved in 1948 by Nobel Prize-winning economist Kenneth Arrow, whose “impossibility theorem” showed that when three or more candidates compete, no voting system yields truly representative results.

[…]

In an avalanche of quirky anecdotes, Poundstone surveys their alternatives: The so-called “Borda count” lets voters rank choices on a ballot, while “Condorcet voting” pairs every possible combination of candidates in a one-on-one duel. “Approval voting” allows voters to give a thumbs up or down to multiple candidates, while an “instant runoff” redistributes losing votes to stronger, second choice contenders.

All alternatives are flawed, but Poundstone suggests that one method, “range voting” — an internet favorite used, for example, to rate books on Amazon.com — is actually the best among imperfect options, because it allows voters to express their degree of preference with a numerical score, rather than a simple yes or no.

At the moment, we haven’t got Poundstone’s book in our collection, though I fully intend to twist the arm of the librarian responsible for purchasing in this area (you heard me—make it so, Susie!).

Now here’s where I pander to the 21 million Americans who watch American Idol.

Remember this guy? Well, if you don’t, you can visit Sanjaya Malakar’s Wikipedia page. Surely a bit of trivia that we don’t need cluttering up our brains, but then again, what’s one more piece of pop culture refuse up there amongst so much trash?

This guy was alternately either idolized or vilified depending upon to whom you were talking. In essence, Sanjaya was a likable enough kid who just happened to be a pretty poor singer, but regardless, he unseated contestant after contestant who should have, by any objective standards, been favorites to advance to the next round.

Against my better judgment, I know, but this riled me up at the time just the same. The problem was and is obvious. You can vote for your favorite, but you can’t vote against the contestant that you most revile. Given any sort of voting system that took into consideration voter preference amongst the entire slate, it is a virtual certainty that Sanjaya Malakar would have plunged at least nearly to the bottom of the barrel every time. Though maybe that is just wishful thinking.

In an interesting response to Poundstone’s book, Farhad Manjoo over at Salon.com ran a range voting analysis based upon the contentious Florida poll results of the 2000 Presidential election. Here is how he set it up.

10-point scale (0 through 9). Voters behind George W. Bush rate him a 9 and Al Gore a 0. For Gore voters, you can reverse those numbers. Naderites assign their man a 9, Gore a 1, and Bush a 0.

Realistic? Well, I make no claims in this regard. Manjoo calls this “being conservative”, though, honestly…who knows? I feel that he probably puts too much stock in the tendency of voters to be predictably antithetical; possibly, in the hard schism assumed by his hypothesis, he implies an acrimony that actually came about later on, once Democratic voters got to know their President a bit better. But perhaps it’s all the same in the end.

Look, let’s be honest—the whole thing is flawed almost from the get-go given the tendency of some voters towards a black or white dichotomy in their political selections, and others towards more nuanced levels of acceptance. A political scientist can have a field day explaining why a scaled voting system might provide a bias to one candidate or the other. And though I’ve studied public policy, I am emphatically not a political scientist—to say nothing of that level of analysis being well beyond the scope of this stupid post. So we’ll just leave it at that and get back to Manjoo.

Here are his results:

• Bush: 4.43
• Nader: 0.64
• Gore: 4.44

Make of that what you will.

Steven Levy picks up this conversation over at Newsweek and I’ll wrap up this discussion with a generous snippet from his review.

Poundstone’s choice aligns him with a mathematician from Cleveland named Warren Smith, who stands as the most passionate advocate of range voting. Smith, 43, who runs an information-packed Web site on the subject, has used all his mathematical chops to compare systems and claims that range voting is demonstrably superior-he’s quoted as saying that a switch the system would “be a larger improvement to ‘democracy’ than the entire invention of democracy.”¹ What’s more, he insisted to me, it’s totally constitutional, and our current voting machines can be altered to handle the new system. Smith thinks that range voting can be particularly effective in primaries, when voters must choose among a long slate of candidates. “It’s in the party’s own interest to switch to range voting,” he says. “There would be a much better chance that the best candidate would win, and then the party would do better in the general election.” Plus, the popularity of range voting on the Internet-not just Hot or Not but innumerable sites that ask people to rate restaurants, movies and books-has made people comfortable with the idea.

Will we ever change from plurality voting? Some groups are working hard to come up with alternatives. Advocates of a system called instant-runoff voting (IRV) have gotten some municipalities (San Francisco) to adopt their system, which asks voters to select, in addition to their preferred choice, their second and even third favorites, which can be used in case no candidate wins a majority. (Poundstone’s book notes flaws in IRV, notably a scenario in which the least-preferred candidate among three could win the election.) As for the possibility of range voting being adopted, I’m not so sure that citizens will necessarily think that effectiveness in choosing hunks and hotties will tilt them toward choosing leaders in the same way. Poundstone, though, is optimistic about the long run. A switch to range voting in, say 50 years, “is something I would say is conceivable,” he says.

In a sense, the battle between those defending our current systems and those who are urging change is emblematic of many problems that have proved intransigent. Those who seek provable, data-driven solutions are frustrated by a resistance to change-and the inertia bolstered by special interests that feast on the dysfunction. It’s enough to drive a mathematician insane. “I find it maddening when people say that Nader was an evil man for running against Gore,” says Warren Smith. “What’s evil is the voting system. It just drives me nuts.” Poundstone’s book raises a big question: how mad do the rest of us have to get before we change a system that just isn’t working?

No, not these guys, or even this guy, but rather this woman.

This comes from The Telegraph:

‘Wolf woman’ invents Holocaust survival tale
By Bruno Waterfield in Brussels

A woman’s best-selling account of how she lost her parents to the Holocaust and survived by living with wolves in the forests of Europe has been exposed as a fabrication.

“Surviving with Wolves” [alternately: Misha: A Memoire of the Holocaust Years], first published 11 years ago, has been translated into 18 languages and was recently turned into a film.

But in a statement issued by her lawyers, Misha Defonseca, who was born Monique De Wael, confessed that while her parents, members of Belgium’s resistance, were killed by the Nazis her family was not Jewish and most of the events of the book were made up.

[…]

After crossing Belgium, Germany and Poland alone on foot, close to starvation in a vast forest, she was adopted by a family of wolves.

[…]

But suspicions were aroused in Belgium’s Jewish community and some of her old school friends from the Anderlecht district of Brussels recognised her.

They insisted that she was born and raised a Catholic by the De Wael family and lived with her grandfather after her parents were deported.

[…]

Despite growing evidence in recent weeks of inconsistencies in her story, including a birth certificate showing she was not Jewish, Mrs Donfonseca insisted she was telling the truth until she released her statement.

And that thunderous crack you just heard like the firecrackers of the gods is actually the racket produced by thousands of palms meeting forehead as it occurs to technical services librarians around the world that Surviving with Wolves will need to be reclassified on Monday (breathe easy, FPL staff—it isn’t in our collection).

Look, I don’t mean to suggest that my b.s. detector is particularly acute, but when you claim that you were taken in by a benevolent wolf pack with no designs whatsoever on rending your soft, juicy flesh from your delicious, marrow-filled bones…well, the burden of proof is just on you, I’m sorry.

A customer was in the building yesterday inquiring about some autobiographical stuff that the author Jeffrey Archer [check catalog] wrote concerning his term in prison. Archer did a two-year stint between 2001 and 2003 for perjury and perverting the course of justice (four-year sentence, but paroled at half-time). Don’t ask me to explain it. Something to do with a faked alibi and a romantic tryst with a call girl. There was also some convoluted business about the laxity of his imprisonment that got Archer and some others into a further spot of bother, but frankly, it is all a bit difficult to unravel and I haven’t got the attention span for it.

In any event, this customer query reminded me that I’m currently sort of vexed with Jeffrey Archer after reading a Publishers Weekly Q&A with him in the January 21, 2008 issue. His new book, A Prisoner of Birth, is, apparently, an homage to Alexandre Dumas’s The Count of Monte Cristo [check catalog], so when PW asked him to discuss any new impressions he gained from rereading Dumas’s classic (while in the slammer, which was probably nothing like the Château d’If), Archer said:

When I read the story a second time, I realized the whole secret rested on (a) Dantes’s escape from jail, and (b) having escaped, aware that in a cave on Monte Cristo was a treasure trove unequaled in the world. Such a convenient ploy may have been acceptable in 1844, but surely not today, so I was aware that it would be necessary to have an original escape and an original way of becoming wealthy before one could set about writing the opening paragraph. The process took about three months of intense thought before I came up with a solution to both problems.

Let me first say that I think Archer has expressed himself ambiguously here, and I am not certain that I fully take his meaning. Ambiguity notwithstanding…I don’t know…that bit bothered me.

Maybe there’s some point of truth in it, but you could just as easily reduce any adventure novel to two or three whimsical plot points on which the rest of the story’s fabric hangs (and I’m not even sure I can get behind Archer’s implied assertion that “a” and “b”, as he pulls them out, are terribly arbitrary). Aren’t plot contrivances sort of intrinsic to the structure of an adventure book?

I suppose I simply disagree that Dumas’s story would be dismissed on the quaintness of its narrative vagaries if it were written today. What Archer perceives as a quality of triteness, I would argue is simply familiarity. There is probably little doubt that Monte Cristo is outlandish, but isn’t that simply the nature of the beast with this sort of book. At least Dumas deals in some rather weighty themes, such as greed, vengeance, and redemption.