Random Thoughts

The first Murderbot TV series season was based on the first very short Murderbot novel — so I wondered whether this second (very short) novel was going to be as dense as the first one. (I guess they call it “a novella”, but it felt more like a short novel to me…)

But it’s not. I wonder whether they’re going to attempt to pad this one out to ten episodes as well?

The first fifty pages are basically Murderbot having an internal conversation with a space ship, so that’s not very easy to transport to a TV screen at all. I guess they could add a couple crew members to the ship, and make the ship intelligence into a robot…

Anyway, the last hundred pages are very action packed, so perhaps they’ll try to just streeetch the backstory of the various characters? I’ll be impressed if they can get that to work.

Anyway, this isn’t quite as good as the first book, but it’s really, really entertaining anyway. I guess I’ll be buying the rest of the series… How many are there anyway?

Eight! Well, that’s nice.

And… I think it’s time for me to read a longer book next.

Artificial Condition (2018) by Martha Wells (buy new, buy used, 4.25 on Goodreads)

I know virtually nothing about Andy Kaufman — I know that Laurie Anderson worked as his assistant for a time, but that’s about it.

I bought it because Julie Hecht has only written four books, and the other three are absolutely amazing, and have reviews like this:

I.e., perfect books.

Kaufman is usually presented as a “comedian and performance artist”, but he seems to me more like somebody really into practical jokes and winding people up. And Hecht isn’t necessarily very interested in veracity, either, so I have absolutely no idea to what degree the entire book is “true”. In any case, it’s presented as being mostly written in the late 70s, as an article for Harper’s Magazine that spun out of control and was never published back then.

But after Kaufman’s resurgent fame (a decade after his death, with a big autobio film — The Man on the Moon), Hecht has polished it up and published it as a book. It describes Hecht trying to interview Kaufman (and succeeding in the end; the last half of the book is 90% transcription of the tapes she made, apparently), but we also get bits like this:

So Kaufman (and his sidekick Bob Zmuda) were sadistic assholes, basically? I mean, a complex and conflicted person (note: code for “sadistic asshole”).

Hecht obviously liked the guy, and Laurie Anderson did, too, so he can’t be all bad, but the description of his routines (like the one where he read The Great Gatsby until the audience started pelting him) really remind me of that 30 Rock bit where they had a documentary on about 70s transgressive humour? Combined with a portion of modern “it’s just a prank, bro”.

Sorry, sorry — I know there’s lots of people who love Kaufman’s stuff. I just don’t respond well to cringe humour.

Anyway. It’s a good book — it’s funny and kinda exciting.

Was this man a genius? (2001) by Julie Hecht (buy used, 3.72 on Goodreads)

I’ve loved Katchor’s comics since the 80s — they’re all perfect and puzzling — they create their own magical world.

This isn’t a comic book, though, but instead a 470 page illustrated book. Let’s have a look.

So we start off with a retelling of the story of the Garden of Eden, and here my problems start already: I just don’t know from this stuff. I mean, I know that it’s supposed to be a garden with an apple tree, and here Katchor has a date tree. But I have no idea whether he’s 1) being satirical, 2) totes blasphemous, 3) presenting an alternative, also valid story or 4) just goofing off. I’m so non-religious that I just can’t tell.

Katchor seems to be writing a polemical text, as far as I can tell from the way many things are phrased, but I just don’t know what he’s arguing against. And the text isn’t funny enough in and of itself — I think this book just isn’t for me. If you were to write a book specifically designed to not have me as the target audience, I think this would be that book.

(Except for the artwork, which is, of course, very nice.)

From what I remember of the Cain and Abel thing, this seems like a fair recap, I guess? Isn’t it?

Were there two sets of tablets in the bible stories? Hmm. Yeah, I think so? Are there differing traditions as to whether they contained different sets of laws?

OK, OK, I’m going to stop — this book isn’t for me, and after reading 50 pages, I skipped the rest.

That is, I skipped ahead a lot, and … this seems to be an overview of dairy restaurants in New York? I’m sure Katchor made his way from the Bible to New York in the 400 pages between somehow…

The Dairy Restaurant (2007) by Ben Katchor (buy new, buy used, 3.60 on Goodreads)