John Everett Branch Jr.'s Blog, page 4

How ’bout them robot cowboys?! A few notes on ‘Westworld’

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Not the farmer’s daughter anymore: Dolores (Evan Rachel Wood) in Season 1, Episode 5, of Westworld. (Photo: John P. Johnson/HBO)

In 1973, a movie called Westworld, written and directed by Michael Crichton, was released. It’s easy to say what it was about: two visitors to an Old West amusement park that’s mostly populated by androids are terrorized by a robot gunslinger run amok. It was straightforward, so simple as to seem nearly crude now, and nearly mindless (in comparison to the sophistica...

Bedlam’s fresh but respectful take on Shaw’s ‘Pygmalion’

Say a male phonetics professor rescues a female guttersnipe from the gutter, teaches her to speak the English of the upper classes, and passes her off as a duchess—what then? As nearly everyone will recognize, this is the situation presented by the Lerner and Lowe musical My Fair Lady and, before that, by Bernard Shaw’s play Pygmalion, which is currently being presented by the Bedlam company in New York. Nowadays the play seems more obvious than it must have when it was first presented, rough...

A dazzling, puzzling, techno-philosophical SF mystery-thriller: Nick Harkaway’s ‘Gnomon’

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If anything were needed to demonstrate the great plasticity of the mystery as a form, Gnomon would do it. In a future England where privacy has been all but abolished for the sake of greater social order, a woman dissident with the myth-inflected name Diana Hunter dies while resisting an interrogation. A woman police inspector, Mielikki Neith, is assigned to find out why she died and what if anything she was trying to hide. So begins a whopper of a tale by Nick Harkaway, published in Britain...

Update on a work in progress: my friend’s SF novel from the 80s

My friend Duncan was perhaps not really a polymath, but even back in high school he was something in that direction. He was interested in the history of firearms. As luck would have it, there was a shop in our area of University Park (one of the wealthy enclaves within the city of Dallas known as the Park Cities) that specialized in such things, a place called Jackson Arms, which he visited often; he owned an antique that, as I recall, he identified as a matchlock, rather than a flintlock, ri...

Who was George Orwell’s first wife? A new book may tell us.

In the spacious kitchen of a house in Houston occupied by a surgeon, his wife, and their children (one of whom was a friend of mine), I once saw a decorative sign saying, “Behind every great man there’s a woman telling him he’s wrong.” The man of the house was known in my neighborhood to be a surgeon and, I think, a member of the cardiac unit at Houston Methodist that did groundbreaking heart transplants. Less was known—at least to me as a young teenager—about the woman who stood behind him o...

The value of things: miscellaneous thoughts on bitcoins, umbrellas, and ‘Hamilton’ tickets

One of the prominent stories of last year was the skyrocketing price of things called bitcoins. On January 1, 2017, a single bitcoin was worth about $1,000. Today, it’s worth about $13,000, and it neared $19,000 at one point. (Here’s a graph.) That’s pretty crazy, considering that it’s not easy to say what a bitcoin is or why it’s worth anything at all. If you go by its price, it sounds like a speculative investment, yet it was designed to be a currency. In fact, it’s both—like light, a bitco...

Passing glances: choosing a calendar for Mars; a look at Annalee Newitz’s debut SF novel

A question for Elon Musk and the rest of us: What’s the date on Mars? Our first, unthinking impulse may be to say that of course it’s today everywhere—except where, because of that darned International Date Line, it may be tomorrow, or yesterday—and that today is December 4, 2017. But soon we remember that more than one calendar is in use upon Earth; our friends in China may label today differently, as do those who follow Islamic practice or another method. And a little reflection, combined w...

Passing glances: Scorsese on men, Turkle on surfing

Last night I saw a Martin Scorsese film. Does it matter which one? Not for the purposes of what I’m about to say, but I’ll tell you anyway. It was The Wolf of Wall Street.

Considering how often Martin Scorsese has dealt with bros being bros—a list of what that means in his films would be long but would include criminality, infidelity, rape, physical violence against men and women, emotional brutality, and sheer, dumb, chest-beating “I’m better than you are” trumpeting—I couldn’t help thinking...

Get smart: Nick Tosches serves up a scam to warn us against scams

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In Under Tiberius, a 2015 novel from Nick Tosches, a well-off Roman named Gaius who has been Emperor Tiberius’s speechwriter loses his job, goes to what we’d now call the Middle East, meets a scraggly Jewish thief who calls himself Iesous, and decides to work with him to fabricate a messiah named Jesus. The region is rife with would-be prophets and the like, but those guys are howling madmen or mere street preachers; Gaius knows the arts of persuasion, Jesus proves to have potential as a per...

Passing glances: On pop music, poetry, and looking back

I often copy into my journal extracts from newspaper and magazine articles. I used to do the same for passages from books but have dropped it as too time-consuming. Here’s something I copied in today from a summer issue, as I try to catch up.

From “The Defense of Poetry,” a review-commentary by Louis Menand on a book called Equipment for Living: On Poetry and Pop Music (by Michael Robbins), in the 7/31/17 New Yorker:

I enjoyed almost all of “Equipment for Living,” but I found Robbins most cle...