8 1/2 Podcasts, 372 Pages, and Few Regrets
Nov. 8th, 2017 08:04 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
krpalmerA few weeks ago, one of the frequent "what the 'Best Brains' are up to" updates on Satellite News mentioned that Mike Nelson and one of his Rifftrax writers, Conor Lastowka, were recording a podcast. Looking back, I can recognize the odds against my looking further into that. I've admitted several times to my leeriness about Rifftrax, formed when some of their first synch-them-yourself audio commentaries seemed intent on putting down familiar targets, and imagining that mean-spirited mood continuing cast a shadow first on their takes on big-budget pictures I might have had less divergent reactions to and then on their more "MST3K-like" B-to-Z movies even with the convenience of pre-synched voiceovers. The only Rifftrax-related content I'd really taken a chance on was an introduction to one of the last Complete Peanuts volumes, which Conor had been a cowriter for. There was also the complication of how infrequently I listen to podcasts; I can imagine even from my own experience that it may be easier to talk to someone about something than to set down your thoughts in writing, but I have to admit that for me listening seems more time-consuming than reading, and may distract me from doing other things in the meantime. However, there really was something that could get through all of that, and that was seeing the podcast "372 Pages We'll Never Get Back" promised a comedically critical take on the novel Ready Player One...
I might have first seen Ernest Cline's book from an unusual yet unfortunate perspective. When I'd started paging through a copy from a bookstore shelf, perhaps even before it had really started being hyped much less for anti-hype to form in reaction, the first references to early-1980s video games and home computers might not have had a great impact on me before the first-person protagonist Wade's "it's a crummy world" scene-setting, describing refugees from coastal inundation stranded far inland after oil gave out, provoked "*gloom* another technological civilization is doomed and nothing can be done dark future" reactions.
(As a digression, I can wonder now if I was being unfair to written science fiction as a whole in supposing all its futures had become despairing. It was easy enough last decade to run into dire predictions outside of full-fledged novels that oil depletion would kill all of us before global warming could, with any attempt to establish ways out dismissed as naive denial. I did see a short novel in an anthology from the final years of the Science Fiction Book Club that had provoked an uneasy frisson at its hereditary theocracy ruling an almost post-technological America with a remnant of intellectuals idly digging through old landfills outside ruined cities and wondering if China really had put men on the moon before the great collapse, and it was later published as a standalone and perhaps expanded volume. However, my unfortunate disconnection from discussion of written science fiction, tied into the disconnection I've already mentioned, might have kept me from imagining works other than "resentful looks back" and "fearful looks forward." Anyway, the perhaps unexpected development of learning how to squeeze the Earth's sponge a little harder, as many unintended consequences that might have in turn, does seem to have held off that evil day for now, even if now it's easy enough to fear stupidity, hatred, and greed will finish us off first.)
Later on, I did start hearing Ready Player One seemed more about references to the 1980s built into a virtual reality universe than anything; the only problem there was by that point that targeted obsession with the past just seemed another part of the dystopia to me. I do have to face that, given most of my comments here, my own expressed interests might not be any further refined, and perhaps "don't mistake your early-formed interests as universal judgments of worth" is just a subtle distinction to be clung to. Still, even with all of that tied together, the possibility of "an altogether different way to take in even a bit of this at last" and, perhaps, the half-articulated feeling that a movie's one thing but a novel, even a novel with few pretensions to literature and every intention of being turned into a movie, is another meant I didn’t have any great struggles beginning to listen to the podcast.
The tag line "reading a book they're pretty sure they're going to hate" did bring some pause. However, the introductory episode (which did leave me surprised the following episodes were longer) was a bit more willing to talk about "taking a chance." From there, I did find myself thinking Mike and Conor seemed to get along well together, and their discussions were actually funny instead of mean-spirited, if perhaps in a different way than Mystery Science Theater 3000 itself. Even so, discussing a book did have me thinking of the good old days of reading MSTings, although "moment-by-moment commentary" on a printed text would probably amount to copyright infringement, to say nothing of remembering how much effort MSTings had taken back when I was writing them. I suppose I also thought a good bit of the first MSTing I'd worked on, featuring an infamously notable fanfic with a similar sort of "mash everything together and drop the readers in at the deep end to feel gratified they get the references" mood. What the writers of that story made of Ready Player One I can't quite decide, but I haven't yet followed up on my suspicions that of course they're still turning out pretty much the same sort of self-indulgent stuff they wrote in college twenty-five years ago...
Coming to the podcast fairly late, I was able to listen to most of its episodes over a single week. I did keep noticing the comments about just how many people might be listening to it without actually reading the book, and perhaps that did nerve me to a further effort with the thought I might yet be able to form my own opinion instead of accepting someone else's. As I continued to be convinced I didn’t want to pay full price for a copy of Ready Player One, though, I first looked in a used bookstore or two before checking my local library. With no copies in sight, I then signed up at last for an ebook lending application my library is subscribed to, but still had to put myself on a waiting list there. When I did get to sign out an electronic copy at last, I did think through the first two chapters of comments Mike and Conor had made in their first full podcast episode of those chapters not seeming too bad; once I'd got to the first real burst of "fannish nattering," though, the uncomfortable feeling I could feel my own intelligence being sapped did do something to adjust my own reactions.
I could also, though, remember I'd got about that far the first time I'd paged through the start of the novel; my reaction to an argument about calling Ewoks "Endorians" had got me thinking "oh great, he's trying to be clever" and perhaps done that much more to stop me reading and leave me with my first assumptions. There didn't seem much comparable to that, though, and I did notice that in the infamous list of all the media Wade had uncritically devoured over five years of study, while he might have watched the Star Wars movies as "the original trilogy" first and only then "the prequel trilogy," he hadn't gone on to "prequel denial." On the other hand, he did mention that he had emulated the original obsessive fan and hacker James Halliday in the story and told himself Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull didn’t exist; I had the impression I'd seen even that the first time around and then tried to forget it myself.
From that point on, the novel pretty much had me questioning my own interests; the "pathetic home team pride" of Halliday's first personal computer having been a Radio Shack Color Computer 2 didn’t help. A few of the small details about that computer's description had me wondering if some errors had been made, but I did have to face how "my deep but narrow obsession tops your broad general interest" seems part of what was making everything seem so monstrous in the first place. I suppose I was readier than Mike and Conor to see some suggestions of "all this virtual reality gear does not make a healthy way to live," and perhaps even a hint of "maybe I did carry all that study too far," but after I'd picked up on that the dullness of the action could get to me too. As inane as the dialogue between the characters could get, there did seem something lonely about most of the quest, and it was unfortunately tempting to wonder if the efforts to have a diverse cast were all strangely skewed one way or another; I might not have a very broad perspective on that myself, of course. I was finally willing to recognize the novel hadn't just been built around a nigh-nihilistic "I'm rich now, so I'll be better off than anyone else for the rest of my life" conclusion; I'm not completely sure the next steps talked about would make a lasting difference, though. With the novel finished I wound up not regretting having listened to the podcast, and finding I could still go back to it and enjoy it.
I might have first seen Ernest Cline's book from an unusual yet unfortunate perspective. When I'd started paging through a copy from a bookstore shelf, perhaps even before it had really started being hyped much less for anti-hype to form in reaction, the first references to early-1980s video games and home computers might not have had a great impact on me before the first-person protagonist Wade's "it's a crummy world" scene-setting, describing refugees from coastal inundation stranded far inland after oil gave out, provoked "*gloom* another technological civilization is doomed and nothing can be done dark future" reactions.
(As a digression, I can wonder now if I was being unfair to written science fiction as a whole in supposing all its futures had become despairing. It was easy enough last decade to run into dire predictions outside of full-fledged novels that oil depletion would kill all of us before global warming could, with any attempt to establish ways out dismissed as naive denial. I did see a short novel in an anthology from the final years of the Science Fiction Book Club that had provoked an uneasy frisson at its hereditary theocracy ruling an almost post-technological America with a remnant of intellectuals idly digging through old landfills outside ruined cities and wondering if China really had put men on the moon before the great collapse, and it was later published as a standalone and perhaps expanded volume. However, my unfortunate disconnection from discussion of written science fiction, tied into the disconnection I've already mentioned, might have kept me from imagining works other than "resentful looks back" and "fearful looks forward." Anyway, the perhaps unexpected development of learning how to squeeze the Earth's sponge a little harder, as many unintended consequences that might have in turn, does seem to have held off that evil day for now, even if now it's easy enough to fear stupidity, hatred, and greed will finish us off first.)
Later on, I did start hearing Ready Player One seemed more about references to the 1980s built into a virtual reality universe than anything; the only problem there was by that point that targeted obsession with the past just seemed another part of the dystopia to me. I do have to face that, given most of my comments here, my own expressed interests might not be any further refined, and perhaps "don't mistake your early-formed interests as universal judgments of worth" is just a subtle distinction to be clung to. Still, even with all of that tied together, the possibility of "an altogether different way to take in even a bit of this at last" and, perhaps, the half-articulated feeling that a movie's one thing but a novel, even a novel with few pretensions to literature and every intention of being turned into a movie, is another meant I didn’t have any great struggles beginning to listen to the podcast.
The tag line "reading a book they're pretty sure they're going to hate" did bring some pause. However, the introductory episode (which did leave me surprised the following episodes were longer) was a bit more willing to talk about "taking a chance." From there, I did find myself thinking Mike and Conor seemed to get along well together, and their discussions were actually funny instead of mean-spirited, if perhaps in a different way than Mystery Science Theater 3000 itself. Even so, discussing a book did have me thinking of the good old days of reading MSTings, although "moment-by-moment commentary" on a printed text would probably amount to copyright infringement, to say nothing of remembering how much effort MSTings had taken back when I was writing them. I suppose I also thought a good bit of the first MSTing I'd worked on, featuring an infamously notable fanfic with a similar sort of "mash everything together and drop the readers in at the deep end to feel gratified they get the references" mood. What the writers of that story made of Ready Player One I can't quite decide, but I haven't yet followed up on my suspicions that of course they're still turning out pretty much the same sort of self-indulgent stuff they wrote in college twenty-five years ago...
Coming to the podcast fairly late, I was able to listen to most of its episodes over a single week. I did keep noticing the comments about just how many people might be listening to it without actually reading the book, and perhaps that did nerve me to a further effort with the thought I might yet be able to form my own opinion instead of accepting someone else's. As I continued to be convinced I didn’t want to pay full price for a copy of Ready Player One, though, I first looked in a used bookstore or two before checking my local library. With no copies in sight, I then signed up at last for an ebook lending application my library is subscribed to, but still had to put myself on a waiting list there. When I did get to sign out an electronic copy at last, I did think through the first two chapters of comments Mike and Conor had made in their first full podcast episode of those chapters not seeming too bad; once I'd got to the first real burst of "fannish nattering," though, the uncomfortable feeling I could feel my own intelligence being sapped did do something to adjust my own reactions.
I could also, though, remember I'd got about that far the first time I'd paged through the start of the novel; my reaction to an argument about calling Ewoks "Endorians" had got me thinking "oh great, he's trying to be clever" and perhaps done that much more to stop me reading and leave me with my first assumptions. There didn't seem much comparable to that, though, and I did notice that in the infamous list of all the media Wade had uncritically devoured over five years of study, while he might have watched the Star Wars movies as "the original trilogy" first and only then "the prequel trilogy," he hadn't gone on to "prequel denial." On the other hand, he did mention that he had emulated the original obsessive fan and hacker James Halliday in the story and told himself Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull didn’t exist; I had the impression I'd seen even that the first time around and then tried to forget it myself.
From that point on, the novel pretty much had me questioning my own interests; the "pathetic home team pride" of Halliday's first personal computer having been a Radio Shack Color Computer 2 didn’t help. A few of the small details about that computer's description had me wondering if some errors had been made, but I did have to face how "my deep but narrow obsession tops your broad general interest" seems part of what was making everything seem so monstrous in the first place. I suppose I was readier than Mike and Conor to see some suggestions of "all this virtual reality gear does not make a healthy way to live," and perhaps even a hint of "maybe I did carry all that study too far," but after I'd picked up on that the dullness of the action could get to me too. As inane as the dialogue between the characters could get, there did seem something lonely about most of the quest, and it was unfortunately tempting to wonder if the efforts to have a diverse cast were all strangely skewed one way or another; I might not have a very broad perspective on that myself, of course. I was finally willing to recognize the novel hadn't just been built around a nigh-nihilistic "I'm rich now, so I'll be better off than anyone else for the rest of my life" conclusion; I'm not completely sure the next steps talked about would make a lasting difference, though. With the novel finished I wound up not regretting having listened to the podcast, and finding I could still go back to it and enjoy it.