immediacy: ephemeral thoughts on the immediate environment, a blog by Glen Engel-Cox

by Umberto Eco (trans. by Geoffrey Brock

Umberto Eco is one of those authors I really think I should like: his ideas on creativity, the connections that exist between people and culture, and his cleverness are all things that I admire. Unfortunately, I find his prose style dull and his plots prosaic and long-winded. I never could make it through The Name of the Rose and everytime I looked at one of his other novels in the store, I walked away without purchasing it. I ended up buying this one, his most recent, only because I (a) had a gift card, (b) it was 50% off, and (c) it purported to be an illustrated novel, with some kind of connection to comics, a favorite subject of mine. I figured, this had to be an Eco that I liked, if I was going to like an Eco.

I didn't like it, mainly because it is a "little" novel and not as clever as I had imagined it would be. The setup is grand--a sixtyish rare book dealer named Yambo has some kind of stroke that wipes his personal memory clear but leaves his cultural memory intact. This allows Eco to play a wild game of cultural word association as Yambo tries to deal with his close family, whom he doesn't recognize at all, by connecting them to books, movies, and music that he can remember. Yambo starts to delve into his own history in the most intense way, revealing that it is impossible to "go home again," simply because it took him 60 years to make those memories, and it would take nearly the same to recreate them through a personal archaelogy.

But that's the book, basically. It fails to go anywhere from there, but stays focused on Yambo's intense internal conflict, so much that after awhile it becomes only a device for the author rather than a means to advance the plot or some greater idea. There's a jolt about two-thirds in, where I expected something to happen, and something does, but something that drives Yambo even further inside himself.

I don't think it's a problem of translation, either. Simply, what interests Eco about his ideas is not the same thing that interests me, even though we both find the ideas themselves intriguing.

It took nearly four years, but I've finally broken the barrier into the ranks for the top 500 reviewers on Amazon.com. I actually have been under 500 for more than a few weeks, but every time I had gone to post this, I had fallen back over the line again. However, in the last two weeks, I've not only stayed under 500, I've moved from rank 498 to 496 and don't seem to be losing ground--possibly because I've been posting some new reviews.

Date	Rank	Reviews Written	Votes Received
04/05/06	496	420	1827
09/27/04	583	385	1012
04/26/04	698	380	833
04/03/04	723	378	801
01/12/04	890	376	724
12/08/03	994	371	641
08/30/03	1,119	362	510
05/12/03	1,445	346	391
04/04/03	1,980	345	328
01/14/03	2,976	217	221
10/16/02	4,441	171	125
09/28/02	9,916	153	94
09/03/02	15,544	67	50
08/13/02	24,539	31	26
07/18/02	34,975	8	4

I think it more than likely that if I'm ever to become a top 100 reviewer (the next "badge" rank), I'd need to at least double the number of reviews I've posted there and it would likely take another four years. Still, it's something of an accomplishment, and I'm happy to be able to celebrate it.

I think I expected a French version of Alias, and perhaps Nikita the TV series is such, but this movie from 1990 was much darker and, in actuality, more interesting than I expected. It was still a little bit violent for our tastes, including the opening sequences where you are "introduced" to Nikita. I have to use quotes on that introduced, because this is one of those movies where nothing is ever explained, partly because that adds to the hip and stylish nature of the camera work and the dialogue (both of which are great) but also because it helps put the viewer into Nikita's place, where she doesn't really know anything either. That method of always showing and never telling, though, is also what fascinated me about the movie. It would be interesting to see the American version of this movie, Point of No Return, and see if that version maintained the mystery.

Quick recap of the story, without spoilers, if you've never seen this. Nikita is a young woman who kills a police officer, so the government "kills" her and offers her a chance to make amends by becoming a special operative. After years of grueling training, she's "released" to the world, given a fake cover, told her operative name, and informed that she would be called for her first mission in six months. She then goes about becoming a real person (something I would have said she wasn't before she killed the policeman) and things are just swell until that call comes and she is forced to live a double-life. All in all, this is a superhero plot and movie--the first half is the origin story while the second half is the actual plot of the movie. The ending is one of the better for this type of story, and we also liked how, in this movie, people not only got killed when they were shot (unlike most movies of this type where bullets are sprayed everywhere and no one ever seems to get hurt) but they also run out of bullets (see previous comment).

I'm not sure I really liked the movie, but I didn't hate it either, and there was much more a chance of the latter with a film of this type.

I don't totally understand this "Search Engine Optimizer" contest thing that seems to be running once again, but I can follow enough of it that I support this entry, V7ndotcom elursrebmem, by ye olde watching paint dry, mainly because he's trying to win for a charity, and it's a charity that benefits his kids. I like people who are honest and up front about things like that.

My buddy William, the Tex Italian chef, passed this on to me to see if I'd support it, otherwise I'd have been culturally offline once again.

I didn't get tickets to see Neko Case at the 9:30 Club, mainly because I dislike standing for three hours in a smoke-filled room. Turns out the smoke was gone, although I'm sure it was still standing-room-only, because Case is one of those fast-rising hip stars that everyone seems to know about now, but I was there before all of you, I was! Not that it matters.

No, why I'm posting this is because you can hear the whole concert, along with opening act Martha Wainwright, courtesy of NPR. There you go, Polytropos, never say I never got you anything, because this link's for you.

(Of course, I didn't find it on my own, I 'fess. Found via The Ghost of Gordon Sumner.)

Boing Boing has this entry which reproduces a call from Frank Zappa to people to contact Congress regarding censorship. A noble endeavor, albeit the call itself has an error in it. Zappa writes, "...each and every American has three, count them, three (besides the President) personal representatives in Washington," then explaining those are your two senators and one representative. That was incorrect even in the mid-1980s when it was written. There's half-a-million people residing in the District of Columbia who are as American as the rest of us and they don't have those three representatives.

I may no longer live in DC, but I'll be damned if I don't continue to fight for their rights.