Literally On Fire

 Spoiler alert: this post is about the third book in the Hunger Games series, Mockingjay. It took me three years to read the final book so if it’s taking you even longer, cheers, and see you next time.

When this book came out in 2010, I’d just had major back surgery and was just generally in the worst mood ever for an entire year, so my best friend told me not to read the book yet. I understand the advice—this isn’t exactly a raise-your-spirits type of read. Except maybe the worst year of my life would actually have been the perfect time. Because in the end, this final chapter in the series is really all about how life will be terrible sometimes...but you can still come out the other side.

What impresses me most about this book is the author’s bravery—where many authors shy away from pulling the trigger, she kills off loads of beloved characters—in heartbreaking ways. And she doesn’t use future science to genetically engineer any deus ex machina clones, either. As a matter of fact, Collins doesn’t even avail herself of the magic-like science she’d already invented with mutts and magic dresses to heal her hero. Katniss is literally on fire in this book, and she comes out the other side with the scars to prove it. Just like real life. And let’s have a moment of silence for poor Peeta’s eyebrows. I’m betting that detail won’t survive the Hollywood treatment, though, and they’ll make an appearance on the big screen at the end of the fourth film.

Of course, given the extraordinary popularity of the series, Collins had the license so many other writers could only dream of. She could have sent Katniss and Peeta to district 11 to become yam farmers. The central conflict of the third book could have been a protracted debate over how much fertilizer to use, and the book would still have sold many millions of copies.

But even given the extreme amount of freedom she had, it seems to me it still takes guts to take a character like Katniss down such an unrelentingly dark road. The moment when Katniss casts her vote for a new hunger games is at once heartbreaking and all too believable.

The ending is bittersweet—I can’t imagine anyone would call it happily ever after. And thank goodness for that. We need stories in which there is no magical fix, decisions have devastating consequences, and not everyone makes it through—just like life.

Yikes!Who would actually want a victory tour? 

And as much as I’ve enjoyed the first two film versions of these stories, there’s a strange cognitive dissonance that accompanies the clueless marketing. I’ve already railed about the inappropriateness of the Capitol Collection makeup line from Cover Girl. And just the other day I heard an ad for Subway: “Where Victors eat!” Once they’re done murdering other children to survive, and in between being loaned out by President Snow, presumably.

Not only did these advertising folks not read the books—it seems they didn’t read the book jackets. If they ever do, boy are they in for a shock, because Collins didn’t just dress the Girl on Fire in a flame-retardant gown—she literally set the poor girl on fire. 

Unsolved Mysteries

          1. The “Capitol Collection” by CoverGirl

Okay, I like makeup as much as the next girly-girl. I’ve invested way too much of my paycheck in Urban Decay eyeshadow and Too-Faced mascara. But, I also read books. I read the Hunger Games series, for example. And I have to say, I think the folks at CoverGirl are really sort of missing the point. First off, their “Capitol Collection” upholds the beauty ideals of the Capitol—presented in the book as a selfish, dysfunctional dystopia with values that are completely out of whack—and inhumane. So, by all means, let’s encourage our young girls to dress up and do their makeup like those folks. But the ads also offer a range of looks “inspired by” the various districts.

Yeah, I'm sure that's a great look for a day of planting and hoeing in Rue's hometown. 

Um, hey...CoverGirl? The folks in those districts you’re so inspired by? They’re not wearing any makeup.  They’re too busy trying to survive. These folks are pretty busy trying to eat without having to use tesserae that exponentially up the odds that their children will have to go fight and die in a gladiator-style arena. So that look inspired by the agriculture of District 11? That makes absolutely no sense.

TVD: the nation's number one employer of stand-ins. 

      2. Why Can’t They Hire Some New Actors on The Vampire Diaries?

Nina Dobrev is great. She really is. I get the whole doppelganger thing. It’s pretty out-there, but, hey, this is a show about vampires who go to high school, so it’s not like I signed up expecting logic or realism. But, come on. This week’s ep featured not one Nina character—not two—but THREE. She was playing three characters! And what’s-his-face who plays crybaby Stefan was playing two (both of whom kept having Gollum-type moments, so at times it seemed like four). TVD writers, these folks do a great job handling all the crazy you throw at them. But surely you could invent some new characters, and hire other actors to play them? I guarantee Hollywood is full of attractive young actors who could manage to say words like “the cure for vampirism” and “she’s the anchor for the spell that created 'The Other Side'” with a straight face.

3. On the Seventy-first day of Christmas, a migraine came to me...

Again this year, as though someone flipped a switch, on November first, the holiday ads, music, offers, etc. began to come flooding in. Actually, they crept in around the edges even during my beloved Halloween season. I was catching up on a DVR’d series the other day, and saw an ad for Party City for Halloween costumes directly followed by a Macy’s “holiday season” ad. Macys actually seems to have decided that as of September 1, their “season of giving” has officially started. Soon Black Friday will be August 31. Seriously, though, has anyone else done the math here and realized that if the holidays kick off on November 1, given that they tend to hang around for at least a good week to ten days after the new year, we are now looking at over seventy days of holiday madness? Yep, that’s right, the holidays are now twenty percent of the year. For all you folks who’ve already starting snapping Instagrams of elves on shelves—better pace yourself. 

Someone has a lot of time on their hands. 

4. Oddities

Has anyone ever watched this show? It’s on Netflix (which is ruining my life, by the way—or at least my word count). If you haven’t don’t start. It’s weirdly addictive. The show is about a tiny antique store in Manhattan that sells weird stuff—except I’m pretty sure the show’s title refers to the people who walk in the door.

The other day a guy paid hundreds of dollars for a giant kidney stone. I guess technically it was an antique? But: whyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy?

Also: ew.

5.  How will I ever finish NaNoWriMo again...now that I have Netflix?

I’d write more about this one, but season four of Sons of Anarchy is calling.

Five Signs that the World is Not Getting Smarter

 5. It’s Twerking

“So disgusting! To think she used to be a Mousketeer! She’s ruined foam fingers and teddy bears forever! Ew!”

Everyone’s talking about Miley’s “performance.” Which was, I’m sure, the entire point. Well played, little Mouseketeer. Well played.

Suckers!

4. Gotcha!

This summer some network ran a show called Capture. The premise: let’s rip off The Hunger Games. Except they’ll be playing for money instead of their lives. Come to think, beyond the costumes and set, it really isn’t that much like Hunger Games at all. It’s much more like the first twenty minutes of the 1985 movie Gotcha!, which was about people trying to shoot each other with paintball guns. Now that’s a classic film.

Let’s all pop some popcorn and watch people chase each other through the woods on what is essentially a corporate retreat with a soundtrack and screen captions.

3. $9,523.89

That’s about how much the Robertson family (they of the Duck Dynasty) will make for every one MINUTE of mugging for the A&E cameras on this “reality” series this season. I’ve seen it and it’s pretty funny. But is it ten grand a minute funny? I guess that question’s already been answered

2. Keeping up with the quality TV

According to a quick and very depressing Google search, Keeping up With the Kardashians has been on for eight seasons.

Meanwhile, Firefly got yanked off the air after ten episodes. Yeah, I don’t know what else to say.

1. Symbolic Tiger

The other day, I saw one of those World Wildlife Fund commercials. They have been running commercials like this since I was a kid, urging folks to adopt a tiger or an elephant or some other exotic animal by sending in a donation. In the old days they sent you cute mailing address labels with pandas on them. I don’t know if you still get the stickers, but I did notice that the ads now include a word that definitely wasn’t there before:

“For just eight dollars a month, you can SYMBOLICALLY adopt a tiger.”

So now the tragic heartbreak of finding out that you haven’t been able to purchase an actual tiger for just $96.00 can be avoided. I’m so glad they cleared that up. You’ve really got to wonder what kind of phone calls preceded the rewrite of that script. 

“When will you be mailing me my tiger? Can I track the shipping? What does he eat?...What do you mean symbolically adopt?!? I want my money back!”

Just to be clear, we're sending you the STUFFED ANIMAL tiger.

Fiction and the Future

The not-so-distant future is a very popular setting, and for good reason. It’s interesting to wonder where we’re headed. We can extrapolate, but in a way the future is tabula rasa—writers can paint any picture they want, because no one really knows. I think it’s surprising how many similarities these futures tend to have, actually. The popularity of the dystopian setting isn’t hard to explain: it was a big trend (for a while), and also a broken world means built-in conflict.

I’ve written before about the fact that in an alarming number of these possible futures, actual food is no longer a thing. People eat blue pellets or pre-measured scientific portions. Nightmare. The other option is that we go backwards: for example, Katniss providing for her family by hunting in the woods.

Fashion is also a logical casualty in worlds like the one found in the Hunger Games series. For folks in the districts, it’s back to basics: whatever you can scrounge or make at home. This series is interesting because it has both kinds of future world: the futuristic dystopia of The Capitol, and the back-to-our-beginnings Districts. Fashion does seem to be the raison d’etre of the Capitol dwellers, along with the ritual slaying of children, that is.

One other part of modern life that's noticeably absent from a lot of dystopian futures is one a lot of us can’t imagine living without: Reading. Books. Literature.

In the case of characters like Katniss, it’s unclear whether or not there are still books around in her world, but either way she doesn’t have the money or the time to curl up with a new release. I also think it’s strongly suggested that in the Capitol they’ve mostly thrown over thinking for a neo-Roman bread-and-circuses mentality. In a lot of other back-to-basics broken future worlds, books have suffered a similar fate: no one has time to read, because they’re too busy running from the government, dying at twenty-one, or having the love-area of their brains removed.

In some dystopian/SF worlds, the fact that literature is gone is part of the point. In my favorite classic dystopian, Brave New World, literature has been taken away, on purpose, as part of the plan to end conflict—and cognition. Fahrenheit 451, Feed, Uglies—my bookshelf is full of cautionary tales about a world full of people who have lost touch with the great words and ideas contained in books, and this loss has contributed to—or caused—the people to be less than they might otherwise have been.

I could write here about the oncoming storm. The common core standards that quantify how much fiction (versus the preferred, more practical non-fiction) a public school student can and should be exposed to. David Coleman, the College Board president, has been widely quoted as saying that it’s rare in a working environment in which someone will ask for “a market analysis by Friday, but before that…a compelling account of your childhood.” No, Mr. Coleman. I don’t want a compelling account of a random market analyst’s childhood. Or of yours, thanks very much. But wouldn’t the world be poorer if no one ever read about Pip’s coming of age? Or even Harry’s or Katniss’s?

So maybe we are creeping in that general direction. Literature may not be directly practical. I have news: neither is algebra. I’m still waiting for that moment when I need to use something other than retail math (70% off!) in my life. Ever. But literature is communication. Which is sort of important in actual life (at least until we have our feeds installed).

But books are more than that. They’re part of the reason we’re here. Artifacts that testify, sometimes so eloquently that you want to cry, that we’re all trying to figure out what it means to be human.

That’s why I think the 2002 film version of The Time Machine is the most hopeful SF story ever. In that film, as in the book, the distant future’s version of humanity is broken nearly beyond repair, split into two, and the great ideas of the past are all literal dust. But in the movie, the contents of the New York Public Library have been preserved on some sort of self-powering future computer. One of the final scenes shows the hologram librarian of the past reading Mark Twain to a group of Eloi children. The subtext (something people who read literature learn to pick up on—another benefit) is that literature will save us.

As messages go, it’s not a bad one.