Author / Nerdy Spice

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Posts by Nerdy Spice

http://advers.io Formerly "kht" I grew up playing Disney-movie-based games with my baby sister. I majored in English in college, got a graduate degree in creative writing, and then found myself earning a living as a software engineer. I'm working on my second novel and querying agents for my first. I eats home-cooked meals only when my husband Keets makes them for me, and he is still trying to teach me how to turn on the oven. Interests: Victorian novels, modern MFA novels and I'm not ashamed of it, super-long novels that aren’t by David Foster Wallace, Michael Chabon, Claire Messud, Henry James, feminism, movies with Robert Downey Jr. in them, TV shows with Connie Britton in them, Pacey Witter, 90s teenybopper movies with training montages, The Good Wife, Homeland, Tina Fey’s entire oeuvre, Mindy Kaling’s entire oeuvre, shows from the WB/CW circa 2004, and JJ Abrams.
by Nerdy Spice

Westworld Recap: 1×01 “The Original”

 

Welcome to the pilot of Westworld. The opening credits for this show are pretty amazing. To the tune of eerie music, in black and white or diluted color, we see a skeletal hand playing a player piano, human pupils, instruments putting together robotic humans and horses, among other striking images.

“Bring her back online,” a deep male voice says as the lights come up on a naked blonde woman sitting in a chair. Her voice apologizes for not being quite herself in a Southern drawl, and the voice crisply tells her to lose the accent. The woman’s body itself stays motionless, even as a fly crawls over her face, and even onto her pupil. She tells him she’s in a dream, and that she’s terrified. He assures her there’s nothing to be afraid of, as long as she answers his questions. Has she ever questioned the nature of her reality? No, she says.

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by Nerdy Spice

Links We Loved This Week — 10/7/16

Mindy Kaling wrote a short piece about the season premiere of Mindy — check it out at The Cut.

Emily Blunt discusses her role in Girl On the Train, which is very different from her own personality–and how she objects to the need for female characters to be “likeable.” (At Hollywood Reporter.)

Did you get to go to a pop-up Luke’s this week? Luke himself showed up to the one in Beverly Hills! (USA Today)

EW interviewed the cast of That Thing You Do! for a twentieth-century retrospective. Can you believe it’s been 20 years since the O-need-ers?

You wish you cared this much: The Rory Gilmore Reading Challenge

by Nerdy Spice

A Poetic Society

The wind is blowing, blowing over the grass.
It shakes the willow catkins; the leaves shine silver.
Where are you going, wind? Far, far away
Over the hills, over the edge of the world.
Take me with you, wind, high over the sky.
I will go with you, I will be rabbit-of-the-wind.

–Richard Adams, Watership Down

I’m rereading one of my favorite books, Watership Down, in which a group of rabbits travel a great distance to found a new society. In the middle, they encounter a society full of strangely sad, yet remarkably well-fed, rabbits: and they encounter art for the first time. The melancholy poem above is the first poem the heroes have ever heard, and it both mystifies and unsettles them. As, perhaps, any good poem should.

by Nerdy Spice

Designated Survivor 1×02: “The First Day”

In Designated Survivor’s second episode, a second (Republican party-)designated survivor makes her appearance as Kirkman learns that his first presidential address didn’t inspire confidence in anyone; there is an outbreak of racial profiling that leads to the death of a teenager; Kirkman visits the site of the attack only to have violence erupt there too; and the shiny-haired, mumbly FBI agent played by Maggie Q tries to prove a theory that an undetonated bomb is a plant rather than evidence that terrorist group al-Saqqar committed the bombing.

Read on for a rundown of the highlights, and the moments that made us shake our heads.

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by Nerdy Spice

Links We Loved This Week — 9/30/16

 

Svetlana Mintcheva, writing for Salon, manages to tackle the Great Lionel Shriver Internet Meltdown without herself melting down, articulating a nuanced but still socially responsible take on the responsibilities of fiction writers:

Whether they succeed in communicating empathy and in creating a character that is complex and true, depends on the capacity of the writer as a writer and his or her creative integrity, not on the person’s skin color, sexuality or cultural background.

Do you follow Rabih Alameddine (author of one of my favorite-ever female fictional characters) on Twitter yet? The New Yorker wrote an interesting piece about his process.

Not technically a pop culture related piece, but by one of our favorite novelists: Michael Chabon wrote a devastatingly beautiful piece about his teenage son’s love for fashion, for GQ.

In case you missed it, the New York Times published an exquisitely mean review of a new Jane Jacobs biography, including jabs like this:

It often seems to be muttered as much as written, like one of those garbled subway announcements you cannot understand but suspect might matter.

 

by Nerdy Spice

Hannah Arendt on the T-word

And by the T-word I mean totalitarianism, of course.

Before they seize power and establish a world according to their doctrines, totalitarian movements conjure up a lying world of consistency which is more adequate to the needs of the human mind than reality itself; in which, through sheer imagination, uprooted masses can feel at home and are spared the never-ending shocks which real life and real experiences deal to human beings and their expectations. The force possessed by totalitarian propaganda—before the movements have the power to drop iron curtains to prevent anyone’s disturbing, by the slightest reality, the gruesome quiet of an entirely imaginary world—lies in its ability to shut the masses off from the real world. The only signs which the real world still offers to the understanding of the unintegrated and disintegrating masses— whom every new stroke of ill luck makes more gullible—are, so to speak, its lacunae, the questions it does not care to discuss publicly, or the rumors it does not dare to contradict because they hit, although in an exaggerated and deformed way, some sore spot.

–Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism

If you have not read this book, this is an excellent time to read it. It has important insights not only on the workings of terror and totalitarianism–as above–but on the horrors of the plight of refugees in the modern world.

by Nerdy Spice

The Mirror Thief – Martin Seay

“Turn, you stern merchants of forgetfulness,
you mincing forgetters of consequence, turn!
Tend to your sad taxonomy, your numb ontology,
your proud happenstance of secular wheels!”

—The Mirror Thief

Martin Seay’s big, intricate debut novel, The Mirror Thief, came out earlier this year to much anticipation (at least in the insular world of people who read Publishers Weekly). Continue reading →

by Nerdy Spice

Links We Loved This Week — 9/23/16

Joss Whedon got basically his whole stable of actors to film an irreverent PSA on exercising your civic rights to vote. (This should hardly need saying, but don’t read the comments.)

“Do we want to just be the white male anti-hero network? We need to try to broaden out.”
–an FX exec, on turning down Breaking Bad

At Hitfix, Alan Sepinwall writes about the ascendancy of FX, which is apparently due in large part to the creative direction of the network head, John Landgraf. (via Longform.org)

AV Club wrote a great review of This Is Us, but it paled in comparison to this delightful Gilmore Girls-related exchange in the comments:

screen-shot-2016-09-21-at-3-55-44-pm

Elliott Holt writes on the return of omniscient narrators in contemporary fiction, comparing them not to God, but to a smartphone (via the NYTimes)

by Nerdy Spice

Designated Survivor: What if the President was Jack Bauer and Jack Bauer was a nerd?

If there’s one drawback to the fact that this is the golden age of TV, it might be the fact that it can spark discontent with regular old network TV shows, where the pilot introduces you to the whole cast of characters in broad, archetype-inspired strokes and people express their feelings by stating exactly what they are feeling.

Designated Survivor is one such show. In the beginning, Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Tom Kirkman is lounging in jeans and a sweatshirt to watch the State of the Union from afar. One minute he’s a meek, minor Cabinet member about to be fired from his job; the next, the Capitol explodes and he is sworn in as President. The first ten minutes, in between explosions, serves as a series of not-so-gentle reminders that you are not watching Jack Bauer. He is meek! He wears spectacles! He cooks breakfast for his kids! At one point, he even defers to the President’s opinion! Basically he is everything Jack Bauer is not! But when he is thrust into a situation that requires strength and leadership, will he be able to rise to the role? WHO CAN TELL?! (My guess is yes. Otherwise this show would be on HBO.)

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by Nerdy Spice

Eight Reasons You Should Watch Wonder Boys, Like, Right Now

I was very sad to learn today that Curtis Hanson had died. He is known for LA Confidential and 8 Mile much better than this little-known gem, which grossed $33 million at the box office (with a budget of $55 million… ouch).

In Wonder Boys, Michael Douglas plays Grady Tripp, a writing professor with a never-ending novel manuscript, a pregnant mistress, and a suspicious editor. It’s in that category of intellectual indie-style movies that don’t seem to have a plot and yet are chock-full of events (this one has a murder and a car chase, among others, that have very little to do with the actual meat of the story). And it’s based on a novel—Michael Chabon’s of the same name, also extremely good—which means that it was always inherently in danger of plotlessness.

Am I not making it sound great? Trust me, it is. Yeah, it’s quirky; yeah, it’s got Tobey Maguire in it and he’s kind of annoying sometimes; yeah, a lot of us are kind of over that quirky-indie-movie-that-goes-nowhere genre. But—especially if you’re a writer, but even if you’re not—you should Totally. Watch. This.

Here are eight reasons why.

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