Recently on “Fresh Air,” Aaron Sorkin explained why he didn't see Trump as a major character in future shows about his presidency.
“A character without a conscience is not an interesting character,” Sorkin said. “You take Richard III’s conscience away from him and we’re not interested in that play.”
It sounded good, but then I thought: For four years and counting, Trump has held the country – the world – in his orangey, asinine thrall.
(I'm off for a bit, coming back the Monday after Thanksgiving.)
A contributor to The Spectator's "Books of the Year" noted that there are "plenty of novels that are woke, few that might keep anyone awake."
It reminded me why I read The Spectator. I don't agree with its politics (though, unlike with American magazines, they're sometimes hard to pin down, as writers often take positions at odds with their colleagues' a few pages away) but I prefer the lively tone and the contrarian wit to the dull earnestness of politically correct publications.
I'm enjoying The Queen's Gambit but it has me wondering if every adult in Kentucky in the 1950s had a chip on their shoulder.
Yesterday on “Fresh Air,” Terry Gross interviewed Sigrid Nunez about her new novel and at one point mispronounced the name of the French philosopher Simone Weil. (It’s ‘Vey’ – as in ‘Oy vey.’) A few minutes later Nunez said the name, giving it the same pronunciation Gross had (‘While’). It was impossible to tell if she too was clueless or if she was exhibiting extraordinary tact.
Last night while watching the Rays-Astros game I read a review of a book about Joaquin Guzmán (El Chapo) in a week-old New York Times Book Review. The reviewer, Alma Guillermoprieto, suggested in an aside that interested readers might want to watch the Mexican film Miss Bala for “a chilling fictionalized portrait of Guzmán’s world.” Between innings I did a little surfing and found Miss Bala on HBO Latin America.
My latest streaming success – finding a quality show that I haven’t read or heard about – is the German series The Last Word. It’s a comedy about death, in the way the Italian series, The Vertical Line, is a comedy about cancer. In the first episode, a couple is hosting an anniversary party, at the end of which the husband drops dead. He was a beloved husband and father, we learn, and a delinquent dentist, spending the last two years of his life going to his studio to paint instead of to his office. This is news to his widow, who, now bereft of savings, must downsize the lavish funeral she had planned. She must also find a job. At the funeral she discovers a talent for public speaking, and gets herself hired by the funeral director as the home’s official eulogist.
There is humor in all of this, played very deftly by all of the actors, and intelligence. The subtitles are in English except on the rare occasions when the characters speak English. This happens in one of the early episodes, when Karla, the eulogist, tries to console a distraught young man who has just lost his wife. She mentions James Joyce as an example of a husband who also felt an intimate attachment to his wife. “I can smell her farts,” she quotes the great writer, “in a room full of farts.”
I suspect you don’t get literary references like that on Schitt’s Creek. (Though, considering the show's name, you should.) And if you do, they’re not in a foreign language.