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1. My brother has apparently contracted Lyme Disease. Read up on it and don't recommend reading if you are prone to hypochrondria. I'm not. But...seriously, some of those symptoms I have. Vertigo, Fatigue, headaches, joint pain, arthritis...check, just not all together. And no fever or rash. Also I'm not outside enough where the ticks would be located. My brother on the other hand...is a horticulturalist who is turning his backyard into a farm. And his back yard gets a lot of white tailed deer. They are treating it with antibiotics. He's out on Fire Island, recuperating on the beach.

I'm hoping he's okay. Lyme Disease is scary. My sister-in-law has been obsessed with it for the last ten years now.

2. Legion

Finished watching S2 of Legion, which is more wacky than S1, but follows the limited comic series relatively closely. ( spoilers for the comic book and television series )

Anyhow that was the comics. And so far the series is following the limited series fairly closely with some minor changes.

My difficulty with the series is I don't care about anyone really other than David. Everyone else is barely developed and to the extent they are -- they are annoying and rather flat. Actually the slower paced episodes are the ones that attempt to focus on the other characters points of view and you feel as if you are watching them under water or something.

We're very much in David Haller's head and David is an unreliable narrator, mainly because he's most likely insane and has been from the beginning. So Haller really has no idea what is real and what isn't. He's also extremely powerful. So you have someone who is going insane that can basically with no effort whatsoever see inside everyone's head, and not only do that, change their reality or how they see things.

( vague spoilers )

So, an uneven bag...Dan Stevens is amazing as Haller, but everyone else...sigh. I do like Lenny.
Also the educational bits are really cool. And as long as we are in Haller's pov, the story moves along. When we leave it -- it slows to an abrupt halt and slugs along, I sort of drifted off during some of those sections.

(no subject)

My parents are reading The President is Missing, and all reviews on it. Apparently there's one that my father enjoyed in The New Yorker, which slams the book ...although reading the review gave me a headache. I posted to FB then deleted after making it half-way through.


Review of the President is Missing by the New Yorker

Key take-aways:

* Bill Clinton, who can write, has hooked up with James Patterson, who can’t, but whose works have sold more than three hundred and seventy-five million copies, most of them to happy and contented customers for whom good writing would only get in the way. This unlikely pact has resulted in “The President Is Missing” (Knopf and Little, Brown), which we must, not without reservations, describe as a thriller. Get a load of this: “The stun grenades detonate, producing a concussive blast of 180 decibels.” A hundred and eighty, mark you, and not a decibel less! If that isn’t thrilling, I can’t imagine what is.

*Collaboration is a murky trade, and it covers quite a range. Whether you’re siding with the enemy in Nazi-occupied France or laying out the lyrics to “Edelweiss” so that Richard Rodgers can devise a tune to match, you’re a collaborator. But no joining of forces is more difficult to fathom than the partnership between two writers. Writing, like dying, is one of those things that should be done alone or not at all. In each case, loved ones may hover around and tender their support, but, in the end, it’s up to you. So, when two writers decide to merge, what do they actually do?

Well, I’ve heard rumors of novelist couples who produce alternate chapters: one for you, one for me. A tidy scheme for twin souls but otherwise, assuredly, a prelude to divorce. Also, how can you guarantee that the cracks won’t show between your styles? John Fletcher, a popular and gifted playwright, once hooked up with some old slacker named Shakespeare to bring us “Henry VIII,” which was first performed in 1613, and linguistic analysis can propose, scene by scene, who delivered which slices of the cake. (Fletcher, who liked to get by with a little help from his friends, later conjured a play with three other writers. I bet that was peaceful.) Even so, nobody is sure about the sequence of events—whether Fletcher rounded off what Shakespeare couldn’t be bothered to complete, or whether the play was genuinely conceived in perfect harmony, with one guy sitting on the other’s lap, their fingers interlaced around the quill.

This is true. I rarely like collaborations. Something is always lost. They only work with plays or screenplays, and rarely there as well. Fanfic collaborations -- I've noticed are rather horrid, including the one I tried. Why? No one can agree on the plot. And if they do? It's paint-by-numbers, because it almost has to be for everyone to fall into line. They can be a lot of fun to write -- but painful to read. Writing is a solo profession not a group activity, unless you are a television writer.

*Yet the puzzle remains: why James Patterson? Why not Daniel Silva? It’s understandable that Clinton, with limited time on his hands, might well scout for a partner; you really need a Sundance Kid, if you want to be a Butch. Clinton could have taken his pick from the ranks of American novelists, though whether Don DeLillo would have leaped at the chance is open to debate. Personally, I’d have plumped for Martin Cruz Smith, who has demonstrated, since the first two sentences of “Gorky Park” (1981), that the English language lies at his command, whereas Patterson is helplessly at its mercy, as even the briefest browse of his corpus will confirm. Still, what a corpus: almost two hundred books to date, of which sixty-six have headed the Times best-seller list. In 2016, Forbes estimated his net worth at around seven hundred million dollars, a sum that would have made even Marcus Aurelius ditch the Stoicism and buy a yacht. If Clinton, like all aspiring novelists, yearned for his book to sell, he chose the right wingman. It could be called “The President Is Cashing In.”

But the gods are just, and although they denied the gift of literary grace to Patterson, they bestowed on him an even rarer skill. As a collaborator, he’s the top. Barely can he sketch an outline without reaching for a sidekick. So numerous are his assistants that one has to ask, less in snotty disapproval than in ontological awe, how many of Patterson’s books are actually “his,” and to what extent he is a writer at all, as opposed to a trademark or a brand. Were he to unearth a distant ancestor, in cinquecento Florence, whose output is mostly attributed to “the workshop of Giacomo Paterfilio,” no one would be surprised.