Finding Favor

( That TV meme thing again )

Day 06 - Favorite episode of your favorite TV show

The coin, it flips. In the end, it came up on profound rather than funny. TOS was allegedly a drama, after all.

"City on the Edge of Forever" always stood out as Trek at its best, even while watching it as a kid. This was before I knew who Harlan Ellison was, and certainly long before I learned that he was also the infamous "Cordwainer Bird" that, around that same time in the 70s, had put his Alan Smithee pseudonym on another early sci-fi effort I watched, called The Starlost.

I did know, not long after first seeing the episode, that Ellison's original vision differed from what was shown on NBC. In one of those Paramount-authorized dimestore novelization anthologies, the editor changed the story around to incorporate what she (I think she, it may have been future concordance editor Bjo Trimble) considered to be the best of both worlds. Yet despite these differences, the resulting product still falls into most viewers' Top Five, if not Top Altogether.

It had its funny moments. "Stone knives and bearskins" is the lasting phrase from the dialogue, with Kirk's riff about Spock encountering a mechanical rice picker still in my mind. Other than the central gadget, there were no flashy aliens to shoot at or X-wings to shoot down. It was just the people, and the choices they made and had to make, that made it special.

Almost 20 years later, and going on 15 years ago, that episode became the basis for one of my first-ever pieces of published fanfic. "Published," that is, in the sense of "stuck up on a usenet group to be mocked." It used to come up fairly regularly if you googled my name, but fortunately, I had the presence of mind about a year ago to post it here.

And here, as well:

( It's not that long, but the line at the soup kitchen is.... )

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Thanks to a longtime AOL trivia pal for the new icon. I hauled the weekend's round of tree-killing out of the backyard before 9 this morning, before it got ridiculous hot out there. Continuing the Trek motif, this is the kind of weather that Worf would have looked outside, steeled himself, and said, "Today is a GOOD day to melt!"

Non-pulp Fiction

Busy readers under this roof in recent days. After serious slacking for the weeks I was away from Le Gym, I'm now on my 15th book-read of the year, keeping me right on last year's pace and likely to improve (in the reading as well as, I hope, the gym-ing departments).

Good authors and NPR recs have helped. Joss's fourth novel, Backseat Saints, arrived mid-June, and I took first dibs. Amazing writing, textbook uses of tense and person for full effect, and characters that make you laugh, cry and think in roughly equal measure. It took me a bit longer to read it than it might have since I had at it before we got past late June's graduation/crazywork/car scenarios, but once I got toward the home stretch, I couldn't put it down. Eleanor then blazed through it in a few days, and Emily did nothing but read it for about a day and a half. Three thumbs (or, if you prefer, dog's legs) up:)

Since we had a signed first edition of Joss's book, I chose not to shlep that to the gym, and so those journeys continued my reading of an earlier book and the entirety of a second one. The latter was one I'd heard about on NPR: Mishna Wolff's I'm Down, a memoir of how her genetically white and even culturally whiter (as in Canadian) father came to this country, fro'd out his hair, and basically raised her as a little black child despite her hippie mother being equally white herself. It's laugh-a-page funny, but also has more than its share of touching moments, particularly most of the final chapter of her Pacific Northwest childhood. An accomplished long-distance swimmer by the time the story ends, her father chooses to come along with the team on its team-building swim across Lake Washington. I just about teared up as I read the story of how her father tried so hard to keep up with his fast-disappearing daughter. (Can't imagine why THAT might be, huh.)

Before discovering Mishna, and again after finishing it, my cardio book has been Two Lives, another memoir, but this one mostly about the author's recently deceased great-uncle (of Indian descent) and his also recently deceased wife (German by birth). Vikram Seth tells the tale through interviews with his "Shanti Uncle" and extended quotes of the elder's letters and other mementoes. It includes much about the horrors of World War II; at one point, Eleanor asked why I seemed okay with that and yet couldn't make it through the more recent memoir of life in Zimbabwe titled WHEN A CROCODILE ATE THE SUN: A Memoir of Africa. I think it may be because of the greater familiarity, and lesser time distance, connected with the latter. Hitler's deeds, horrid as they were, occurred in The Past;  the African atrocities that Peter Godwin describes occurred, not only during my lifetime, but during our daughter's. We have so much further to go.

Finally, to replace Joss on the at-home circuit, I've begun The Help, by an author who comments on Backseat's dust jacket and which Eleanor had independently heard of. It tells a tale of homegrown racial injustice, this one also within my lifetime, of 1962 Mississippi. It's well written and the story is coming out, if not quite as beautifully or as evilly-hidden as Joss's stories do; Backseat kept me from even handicapping the real ending, much less guessing it, until almost the final page, whereas I think I've got a Pretty Good Idea where Kathryn Stockett is going with her plot when I'm barely halfway into it.

My own writing has miles to go before it even wakes, but it's good to have such inspirations along the road, even if, these days, it's an unusually short and repeated one.