When I mentioned at Facebook this spring that that I was gearing up to start into Damages, writer and LRB critic Jenny Diski urged me to stockpile food beforehand. It was good advice. The Maud household barely stirred from the couch for two consecutive weekends.

Normally we’d be well into Season Two by now, but the DVDs aren’t out yet, and I’m left mulling over what I’ve seen of the show and wanting to talk about it. Diski indulges me below.
 

Facebook is good for a few things, most notably alerting me to your fondness for Damages. Why is this show so addictive?

It’s almost pantomime. Or classic drama. Not about being original, but about the inevitable. There’s a real understanding of how drama works, not so much by surprise and shock, as by setting up the unstoppable and making the audience know what it coming, unstoppably. It does what the other good TV shows do and uses cliché and stereotype thoughtfully. Not so much turning it on its head, as turning it inside and out, examining it through a lens. The Wire is like this. It takes an obvious notion, almost too obvious of the similarity of the cops and the dealers’ worlds and plays them in parallel. Very schematic. It only just works. So does the resurrection of Cruella de Vil as lady lawyer in tight skirts and high heels manipulating the world. It sort of intensifies what you expect. Hitchcock did that, too. It also examines the great problem of ends and means — a particularly American problem, perhaps, currently. Like The Shield it plays on being mesmerised by the good guy being the bad guy and dragging us along with him/her.
 

Oh, The Wire! While in the midst of Season Four, I seriously thought I’d be happy to spend the rest of my life doing nothing but sitting in my apartment, living through those characters. At times I actually felt kind of angry that this wasn’t an option. And when the show ended, I experienced the same kind of bewildered disappointment that you do as a child when you reach the end of the book you love and are forced to realize that there really, truly, will never be any more pages, no matter how hard you wish for them.

As for Damages, racing through the first season with you on my mind, I couldn’t help thinking of that scathing London Review of Books piece you wrote ages ago about Laura Flanders’ Bushwomen: Tales of a Cynical Species. As you said then, “We can’t get it into our heads that, barring some anatomy, women are very like men. Being able to write their name in the snow when they pee doesn’t entitle men to rule the world, but shaving under their arms doesn’t stop women being self-serving…”

I’m pretty sure Patty Hewes would sign her name to this statement. Or am I reaching?

A case of when she was bad she was very, very good? Patty Hewes is Lady Macbeth in teetering heels. Except that she holds it together as no Elizabethan bad woman was allowed to. Really bad women are wonderful when done well — a bit of a feminist conflict, no?

Mythic mother monsters are in our genes, clearly Glenn Close is rejoicing in playing one of them, a wicked stepmother, Clytemnestra, Medea, the Snow Queen. Wily, clever, foxy and very very dangerous. Patty Hewes is the bad mother we can’t take our eyes off — because she is too dangerous, and because bad is fascinating. Partly, of course, there’s the simple pleasure of not watching women as victims (I can’t tell you how much I loved Teeth!), but also the gathering battle between Hewes and whatshername, the young woman, has a very pleasing samurai quality about it.
 

Ha, yes — it’s like a samuri battle between two hot women with briefcases.

Glenn Close, like many of the more discriminating film actors, has said she chooses her projects based on the writing, and that the best scripts these days are often for television serials rather than movies. Do you agree?

Completely. TV series have been doing strange and edgy things for years now. HBO and others seem to be prepared to take risks (and lose some money?), and let writers write — at least until a couple of seasons in. Hill Street Blues, Homicide, Oz were far more interesting than most movies. So are The Wire, Boston Legal, Weeds, Studio Sixty (before they messed with it), Breaking Bad… and Damages. Maybe it’s the scope permitted for developing an idea and characters that a film hasn’t got. And there’s also a playfulness that’s allowed in TV series — Boston Legal (astonishing playing around with male love, as well as full on attacks on the American right).

But I think that there have been many indie movies that do interesting and original stuff — Charlie Kaufman still gets to write (and now direct) films. It feels like people writing and making a lot of TV series are having fun and assuming that their audience think, in the way that the fast, wordy comedies of the 30’s did. They expect you to keep up. I don’t get that feeling with most regular movies.
 

I’ve only just finished Season One, so I’m way behind. Fans seem to be split on the second season. Should I bother? (As if I can stop myself.)

The terrible thing is that being in England, I haven’t seen the second series, either. I’m way behind with everything — though there again there’s lots to look forward to. And since I prefer pigging out and watching several episodes of stuff at a time to an allotted hour once a week, I have to wait even longer for the DVD’s to come out over here. I’ll watch the second season — and stop if it isn’t any good. I can see that it might not be. It’s done what it’s done. Terribly difficult to let something good be. The TV series suffer from the same thing as dreadful sequels of good movies — the milking of something that has been used up.
 

Thanks, Jenny. I can’t wait to start reading your next book.

I probably won’t be able to resist Gordon Thomas’ Secret Wars: One Hundred Years Of British Intelligence Inside MI5 And MI6, a book Simon Maxwell Apter calls “such a rollicking good read, Thomas can almost be forgiven for his supercilious attitude toward ‘human rights lawyers’ and his somewhat sycophantic approval of any action pursued, legally or not, in the name of British security.”

This description of Thomas makes me think of Neil Burnside, the Thatcher-loving hero/antihero of MI6 drama and ultimate Cold War series The Sandbaggers. Set contemporaneously with its original 1978 broadcast, the show ended on a season three cliffhanger after creator Ian Mackintosh and his girlfriend mysteriously disappeared in their single engine plane somewhere near Alaska.

There’s not much available on YouTube, just this slightly truncated version of the credits (above), two short clips from episodes, and a fan’s montage.

The intensity of the argument linked above, if not the content, is awfully familiar. I’ve been so insufferable this weekend on the disappointments of the Battlestar Galactica series finale that I owe everyone I know who also watched the show an apology. I wasn’t allowed much access to TV as a child and consequently never learned to do that thing where you separate real life from the people inside the big, shiny box. Sorry, guys.

(As for the question posed here: cavemen, obviously.)

Actor Patrick McGoohan, best known for his role on the eerie and surreal 60’s TV show The Prisoner, has died.

In the show, McGoohan played an agent who’s kidnapped, imprisoned, and interrogated in a village that would look a lot like Disney World were it not guarded by Rover — a giant, trembling ball that bounds after people and smothers them when they try to escape. (I blame The Prisoner for my visceral dread of Pilates.)

There his name is revoked; he is called only “Number Six.” “I am not a number,” he shouts, when informed of his new identity. “I am a human being!”
 

Mike Cane’s brief tribute to the man and the show notes that the inaugural episode of The Prisoner includes “perhaps the first eBook ever envisioned — a dossier of the agent’s life, seemingly from cradle to the present, with each paper page turn synchronized to a corresponding image on the screen.” (Pictured above; below is a clip of the opening credits.)
 

Few things have the power to draw me out of the hermitage on winter weekends, but when Lizzie invited me down to Baltimore for The Wire’s Season Five Premiere, I packed my bags and hopped on a train.

Of course the party was fun (more photos here). But watching the show on the big screen was magic — until the episode ended and we couldn’t just pull up the next one on DVD.
 

The new season focuses on the media, and particularly on the local newspaper — which shares a name with The Baltimore Sun — where cutbacks and an obsession with shaping the news to win Pulitzers have led to a dearth of meaningful local reporting.

City editor Gus Haynes (Clark Johnson) is determined to put out a decent paper despite higher-ups who keep ordering him to “do more with less.” In this episode, rookie Alma Gutierrez (Michelle Paress) may not have the finer points of usage down just yet, but she’s good at getting people to talk. She’s happy at the Sun, unlike Scott Templeton (Tom McCarthy, The Station Agent), a hungry young reporter who’s angling for a big story so he can leap to a better paper.
 

In a brief speech before the screening, Wire creator and head writer David Simon called the series “a diagnostic exercise in storytelling.” Simon started his career at the Sun, as a crime reporter. Talk to him for two minutes and you’ll see how passionate he is about the integrity of journalism and necessity of local news, and how the decline of the city newsroom — not just in Baltimore, but country-wide — sickens him. In his speech he acknowledged that writers steal from life, and he sympathized with the difficulty for an institution like the Sun of having to “deal with a fictional facsimile and having to stand next to that facsimile.”

For its part, the Sun, which used to praise the show, has soured considerably on The Wire now that Simon has trained his lens on (a fictional version of) the paper. And apparently the defensiveness extends far beyond the Baltimore city line. Mark Bowden, who worked for two of Simon’s former Sun bosses, has penned a hit piece for (surprise) The Atlantic entitled The Angriest Man on Television.

Given the reception so far, I’m guessing Season 5 is a swift kick to the anthill of media complacency. I can’t wait to watch the rest of it.
 

If you’ve missed The Wire until now, give Season 1 a try. Comparisons to Dickens might sound overblown, but they’re not. The critical rhapsodies are deserved.

No, The Wire is not a novel. Watching it is not the same as reading. But I can’t join in pulling out the violins over the (supposed) death of fiction when TV as a form is revealing itself to have this kind of narrative potential. The Wire is a new kind of storytelling.
 

Fans: if you haven’t seen them yet, check out The Chronicles, featuring a young Prop Joe, Omar circa 1985, and McNulty on his first night in Homicide.

A reader passed along the article — and a tantalizing rumor that Kennedy will write an episode for the new Dr. Who.

Google neither confirms nor denies, but does reveal that Kennedy’s a Tom Baker girl. Just like Ursula LeGuin. And any other discriminating human female.
 

The current series is much beloved by SF experts. See, for instance, Neil Gaiman, who’s been watching with his daughter, Maddy. And, sure, it held my interest while Christopher Eccleston was on board. But season 2 is a real disappointment.

(Okay, Girl in the Fireplace was a tidy and reasonably compelling bit of TV, in isolation, but Dr. Who — traditionally a brilliant, emotionally unavailable alien with a touch of Asperger’s and no discernible sex drive — is not supposed to fall in love with every chesty blonde-haired beauty who crosses his path. And while the finale had more of the dark emotional register I’ve missed as David Tennant’s Doctor has spent the season skipping merrily through the universe with Rose, did we really need Daleks and Cybermen and Rose’s alternate-universe father? Did we need Rose to weep rivulets of mascara down her face twice in the space of ten minutes? No, we did not.)

The reader who sent the Kennedy-Who rumor puts it much more succinctly:

The days of Tom Baker, they ain’t. A little corner of my cobwebby heart plays the Power of Krull on repeat, so I’ve decided that A.L. Kennedy could well save the British. (I don’t know what’s happened to them.)

Update: I emailed Kennedy to ask if there’s any truth to the rumor. “I do mention Dr. Who a bit in my show — and this has led to much murmuring,” she wrote back. “But I have no contact with the Who people. I would love to write an episode and say as much to people I meet on the street and all and sundry.”

Fawlty Towers stars Prunella Scales and Andrew Sachs are working together in an adaptation of Evelyn Waugh’s “Mr Loveday’s Little Outing.” The color of Ms. Scales’ wig has yet to be decided.

The first Russian screen adaptation of Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita began airing on TV in Russia Monday night after years of setbacks.

There have been other attempts to adapt the novel but no director has ever achieved a faithful rendition in the eyes of the public. A Polish version focused on the story’s bible themes and a Yugoslav one changed essential characters.

After a Russian production filmed a decade ago was never shown,there were even rumours of a jinx.

The photo of actress Anna Kolvalchuk (above), one of the stars, comes courtesy of The St. Petersburg Times, which notes that while the story is set in Moscow, “the series was largely shot in St. Petersburg, with the crew traveling to the capital for only a few signature episodes.”

“Franzen’s scream has a hint of falsetto; Chabon writhes as he lets out an anguished moan.” As for Tom Wolfe?

“Aaaaaaaahh! Wait, no, that wasn’t good, let me start over.”

“How did you scream last time a boulder was hurtling toward you?” asks Carolyn Omine, executive producer of The Simpsons.

“Why don’t you try, ‘Aaaaahhhh, my suit!’” suggests a rail-thin, nerdy-looking writer.

“Ahhhhh, my suit! It’s gabardine!” wails Wolfe, toward the microphone. “Well, but cops wear gabardine.”

See also:

• Tom Wolfe courageously draws attention to the plight of America’s gold-diggers.

• The University of Idaho offers a short quiz on literary deaths.

• Pending adaptations: Love in the Time of Cholera, I Am Charlotte Simmons, Bleak House, and Paradise Lost. (Final link via a gushing Michael Schaub.)

• Twice today, and several times over the coming weeks, the Sundance Channel will rebroadcast Portrait of a Bookstore as an Old Man, a “film about George Whitman and his famed Shakespeare and Company bookstore in Paris.” (Via Texts & Pretexts; you can explore the bookstore virtually at the official Shakespeare & Co. website.)

• Read the Bible in text message-speak on your mobile phone. And then tell me: are there special symbols for “begat” and “lay with her”?

• A U.S. school has replaced textbooks with laptops and digital material.

• Project Gutenberg’s 16,000+ e-books, are free for the taking. The site offers nightly RSS updates on new titles.

• Images of manga on a Librie. (See photo above; link via Future of the Book.)

• From My Mother Was a Computer: Digital Subjects and Literary Texts (which, if the full excerpt is representative, would benefit from a 75% reduction in jargon): “Suppose Don Quixote is transported not into a new time but a new medium, and that the word sequences on the computer screen are identical to Cervantes’ original print edition. Is this electronic version the same work? Subversive as Borges’ fiction, the question threatens to expose major fault lines running through our contemporary ideas of textuality.”

• Esperanto: the hypercourse. (Via #1.)

• Does “Google’s Ambitious Plan to Put Books Online Offer[] Authors, Publishers New Lease on Life“? Xeni Jardin said it first. Also, did you know that, with your help, Google Will Eat Itself? (Final link via The Morning News.)

you get used to being too young for culture to take your nostalgia needs seriously, and then suddenly you get Hitchhiker’s, Doctor Who and Live Aid, all aimed directly at your heart.

• Kate Winslet may star in the adaptation of Tom Perrotta’s Little Children. My doubts about the screen version of Zoe Heller’s What Was She Thinking? apply equally here, especially given the Pepperidge Farm brouhaha.

• Most people are psyched about the Hitchhiker’s Guide film. I’ve come across one troubling criticism — of the dialogue. From Planet Magrathea: “they have cut most of the jokes out. I’m not being metaphorical here, they really have, in a very literal sense, removed the jokes from the story. There are scenes where all we’re left with is the set-up dialogue.”

• And because I can’t shut up about the new Doctor Who series: the BBC fielded a number of complaints about a scary episode featuring Charles Dickens and a host of misty blue aliens. (Ed Champion has posted some of the best Dickens dialogue from the episode.)

Eight people with dreams of seeing their book ideas become published and being the next author launched to best selling and celebrity status will meet Book Millionaire’s Publishing Committee during July 2005 to start filming of Book Millionaire Reality TV Show.

(Via Publishers Lunch.)

Previously, on British TV: a less lucrative contest, and a triumphant grandmother.

Reed Business Information – the conglomerate that owns Publishers Weekly – and NBC Universal Television (which is owned by the conglomerate General Electric), have combined to launch a new book award, to be called the Quill Awards, which “will be presented at an October ceremony in New York.” According to a report by PW Newsline editor Jim Milliot (which is unavailable as a link), “NBC has agreed to carry the Quills ceremony on at least its 14 owned-and-operated stations that includes outlets in most major markets.”

Quills, eh? So can we look forward to Geoffrey Rush making the presentation in assless chaps?

These wings are V-licious. I’ll put them in my Gravity’s Rainbow Cookbook, right next to “The Frying of Latke 49.”

If these seem like corny dad jokes, they are: Pynchon has said he helped write them, and that he appeared on the show because his son is a fan.

Thomas Pynchon and James Caan guest voice as themselves as Marge won’t let a little thing like “not cheating” prevent her from winning a baking contest [in which Homer is unwittingly competing against her]; Bart takes up a “swinging bachelor” lifestyle after finding Homer’s discarded “Playdude” magazines.

To whet your appetite, take a look at Roz Chast’s “Thomas Pynchon’s Evil Twin,” a cartoon from the November 9 issue of The New Yorker. As exhibitionistic as the famous author is reclusive, the evil twin is depicted saying:

Mud-wrestle in my underwear on national TV while holding up a new copy of my book? NO PROBLEMO!

In email, a “confessed CSPAN junkie” advises:

be sure and let the shows play out as the formal presentation part ends on a segment. Everyone’s microphones remain on, and people start saying all the crazy stuff they’d never utter on-air. Except that they are.

Also on Book TV this weekend: a 1997 interview with Iris Chang, author of The Rape of Nanking, who died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound last week.

If you missed Pynchon’s first Simpsons appearance, Amy’s Robot summarizes it (and provide a sound clip).

(The photo at right, taken from an August 9 New York magazine article on the Republican National Convention, is of the writer and another son, John Buffalo Mailer, editor of stoner mag High Times.)

According to the Hollywood Reporter:

In the Oct. 26 episode, “Norman Mailer, I’m Pregnant!” the younger Mailer plays a reporter who’s conducting lengthy interviews with the celebrated writer in the inn’s restaurant for a series of articles on Mailer’s life. (The elder Mailer hams it up a bit with a running gag about him irritating Lorelai’s partner in the inn by hanging around so much because all he ever orders is iced tea.)

“We just put the camera on the two of them, and they’d just sort of vamp,” Sherman-Palladino says. “Stephen would ask him these deep questions, and Norman would go on and on about his philosophy of writing, his favorite writers, the difference between fiction and nonfiction. Nobody even thought to yell cut. We were waiting for what he’d say next.”

A longtime alcoholic, Mailer is infamous for his combative ways and bad temper. He reportedly stabbed one of his six wives through the chest with scissors, narrowly missing her heart.

He appears to have mellowed somewhat with age. But the Gilmore Girls? (Thanks to Willa for the link.)