Why I love True Blood, despite its failings

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Do I gather from tonight's episode that vampire Pam is descended from John of Gaunt and his third wife Katherine Swynford?  Her last name is given for the first time in tonight's episode as Pamela Swynford de Beaufort, and Beaufort is the name given to Katherine and John's legitimized children after their marriage.

This fills me with glee, and makes me want reread one of my favorite historical romances, Anya Seton's Katherine, which tells the tale of how the middle class Katherine (who was Chaucer's sister-in-law, intriguingly) becomes the mistress and eventually the wife of the most powerful man in England, perhaps even more powerful than the king himself. If memory serves, it is totally enthralling - I am still struck by it vividly fifteen years after reading it.

But linking Pam to that tumultuous medieval romance - I wonder what Alan Ball and Co. are up to....

The Lady likes a Lei: O'ahu Diary (Days 13 through 15)

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Just a little insight into the daily crazy that D endures: I am convinced that if you actually request a lei, it undercuts all the pleasure of being given a lei.  A lei, in my mind, must be freely bestowed in order to be infused with the spirit of aloha.  The result?  Nary a lei has graced my neck in five weeks of Hawaiian residence.  Poor D, every time we encounter a lei-seller, turns to me expectantly, with the words "Would you like a lei?" tripping off his lips.  And I, mysteriously, say no, looking dejectedly at the ground.  He must be totally perplexed by now.

You might be asking yourself why I don't just say, "Surprise me with one." But this question would show a remarkable lack of crazy-literacy.  All crazy-aficionados know that this would be like a meta-request for a lei, undermining all future lei offers.  You might also ask yourself what D will say when he reads this blog entry after I have left O'ahu.  I think I might characterize his future response as "extreme frustration."  But don't worry, D - I wasn't torn up about it.  I made my own floral way around the island.  And when I think of flowers as gifts, I can't ever help but think of Dorothy Parker, whose birthday it is today:
A single flower he sent me since we met.
All tenderly his messenger he chose;
Deep-hearted, pure, with scented dew still wet-
One perfect rose.


I know the language of the floweret;
"My fragile leaves," it said, "his heart enclose."
Love long has taken for his amulet
One perfect rose.


Why is it no one ever sent me yet
One perfect limousine, do you suppose?
Ah no, it's always just my luck to get
One perfect rose.

Even excluding leis (and I do love a lei), O'ahu is an island of flowers.  Intense, expansive flowers.


Notice how the center of this flower glows. I am not ruling out "alien life form" as a possibility.

I fell ill this week, so I wasn't good for much but the occasional wander through the gardens around the hotel and stroll around the nearby beaches.  But, as it turned out, there was plenty to see there, if you focused on the details.  It was then that I noticed, for instance, that a man in full Hawaiian costume comes around every evening just before sunset and lights all the torches that surround the hotel.  Or that the flowers in the gardens are somehow constantly in bloom.  How do they manage it?


Even the food sometimes has a bit of a floral leaning...


We had our best meal on the island (including this dish - was it ginger and panko crusted onaga?  I can't quite remember) this week at Alan Wong's, which I gather was at the forefront of Hawai'i's great local food movement a decade and a half ago.  D started with a plate of Chinatown Roast Duck Nachos that featured ten-inch antennae that may have been transmitting reports on us to the mother ship (or possibly to that flower at the top of this post), and followed them with a steak showdown between two local beef ranches.  I had the five course tasting menu (when I was little we used to call this the "little pig" menu, when contrasted with the "big pig" seven course menu) which included, among other things, a Pacific lobster on a truffle puree..  Let me tell you, this is another beastie entirely from the delectable Nova Scotia weight-lifters I'm used to.  But a lobster in the hand is worth two in Halifax:  it was delicious.  I can't lie, however: my heart still belongs to Atlantic lobster and Maryland crabs.  Roam though I may, I am a girl of strong culinary loyalties.

Truth to tell, our meal was exceptional from start to finish, but the highlight was the drinks menu.  We are neither great drinkers of alcohol nor caffeine, but I have to say that the sweet honey tea was one of the most instantly addicting drinks I have ever tasted.  When we went to Wong's other Honolulu restaurant, The Pineapple Room, a few weeks later, I tried another of his signature drinks, a watermelon lilikoi mojito made with various savory herbs, and was almost as smitten.

Some weeks after that, D and I have come to a well-fed conclusion: we miss the gym.  I have formulated a challenge for us which will go something like this: in the thirty days after I return to Halifax, we must spend at least twenty hours apiece in cardio exercise. If any one of us manages thirty hours in that thirty days, however, we can claim a reward.  Mine, I have decided, will be the complete DVD edition of The Wire, which you can get for quite a discount nowadays.  D is still plotting what his choice will be....

The Quick and the Deadwood: Full Faith and Credit (3.4)

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Al:   "Another invite.  Fucking Hearst. Must take me for a fucking optimist."

Just a few scattered notes on the fourth episode of Deadwood's last season, since I neglected this post for too long a time after watching to give you more holistic coverage.  George Hearst would never tolerate that sort of sloppiness.  I'd better watch my back.

This week we see various explorations of belief (or lack thereof) in word or promise - faith and credit - as Alma opens the town's first bank, Hearst continues to dally with Al in the most threatening and condescending way, and Joanie receives a genial offer from the actor-manager Langrishe for the whorehouse-turned-schoolhouse that sets last week's rape-tinged encounter between Alma and Hearst into stark relief.

We get a trace of Al's back-story, in the middle of another surprisingly tender scene between him and a much blustered-at whore.  (Whores are always falling for Al in a Stockholm syndrome sort of way.  And many of his best "soliloquies" are in fact delivered in company - in the midst of less than engrossing blowjobs.) His mother left him at an orphanage when she went to sell her body in Louisiana - he recalls being held down by an orphanage owner while she screamed from the boat that she had changed her mind, hence his mania for freedom. With this comes the realization - fleeting - that he denies his whores exactly that freedom.  He holds them down, both figuratively and literally.

There are continuing racial tensions with the return of Deadwood's two black residents, Samuel Fields and Hostetler, bringing the horse that killed Bullock's nephew/stepson.  Steve the Drunk, who has been caring for the hostelry in Hostetler's absence (having threatened him with lynching if he stayed), spews uninterrupted racist bile for much of the beginning of the episode.  Bullock, who is stuck mediating the issue, deals with Steve's drunken tirade with considerably more patience than any modern sheriff would.

This highlights the canniness of Deadwood's treatment of the conflict: it would be historically implausible for Bullock to come to Hostetler's defense on an abstract foundation of civil rights principles (although the sheriff is allowed enough enough basic goodness to show frustration with Steve's racist paranoia).  Instead, the show permits him to develop an impatience with Steve's irrational rage and suspicion, especially as contrasted with Hostetler's saintly forbearance.  He sympathizes with Hostetler because Steve is an unreasoning, uncompromising jackass, rather than because Steve is a racist.  However, with irksome neutrality, Bullock doesn't allow this leaning to influence the outcome of the conflict, which seems to me to favor the Drunk.  Alma's bank gives Steve a loan, allowing him to buy the hostelry from under Hostetler.  It seems fortuitous to me that Hostetler actually wants to sell and get out of town; otherwise, this would look considerably more like an eminent domain-type forced sale, using racism to deprive a black citizen of the right to ownership.  Not to say ethnic cleansing, since the deal assumes (rightly) that Hostetler won't want to stay in a camp that tolerates and even rewards the Drunk's rhetoric.  Deadwood seems destined for racial homogeny, and a sameness that privileges the more idiotic facets of the populace while eliminating the more sensible.

The most interesting facet of this episode (both within the world of the narrative, and as a meta-issue regarding representing historicized racial conflict to a modern audience) is the difficulty of Hostetler's position.  He deals honorably with his responsibility for the horse that killed the boy, telling Bullock that he and he alone must bear the consequences of the horse getting free.  He thanks the prickly, bilious Steve for caring for the hostelry in his absence, and explains why he ran in fear of his life. But in the face of an avalanche of hateful bigotry from Steve the Drunk, his goodness begins to seem... passive.  Both to him and to us.  How do you maintain dignity in this face of this kind of treatment? Does non-violence and rationality fail when your opponent refuses to play by the rules of reason and justice?

Take a look at Todd VanDerWerff's brilliant essays about the final season at the AV Club - I will link to them in my future posts.  In his first entry, he discusses the effect of the show's fuzzy cancellation on its original reception ("HBO had always prided itself on being the place for TV creators with something to say could turn to say what they needed to, but it also was a business, and Deadwood was just the most notable example of a show that probably would have continued had it debuted even a few seasons earlier but got caught under the aegis of a network in transition.") and what distinguishes the tone of Season 3 from its predecessors:
If season one of Deadwood is its most self-consciously mythic season and season two is about humanizing and expanding on those myths, season three is the series’ most self-consciously humanistic season. 
His second post takes up "True Colors" and "Full Faith and Credit" ("maybe the most rage-filled episode of Deadwood (no easy feat)"), and ponders whether Deadwood doesn't struggle, at this point, from a plague (a veritable surfeit) of characters.

Or, of course, you could read Sycorax Pine on