Monday

Two more things off the to do list tonight: I finished reading Of Human Bondage,¹ and we've watched the first season finale of Heroes.² I liked the book better than the show. I finished the text of the novel late Friday in a North Carolina hotel, and just minutes ago finished the extensive introductory material in my replacement edition (material I frequently skip in other books, but since this was by the likes of Graham Greene and Theodore Dreiser, I couldn't ignore in this one). Heroes, on the other hand, mildly racist and mindlessly enslaved to a soapy compulsion of the creators' to subvert any possible internal consistency to some grandiloquent display of dramatic tragedy, strives to be ignored. The vast number of irritating plot spasms, inconsistent with reality and also within the parameters of the fantasy, are easiest to complain about; but these are also spoilers. More irritating was my general feeling that I was watching a band of stereotypes mark time between predictable ends; that the show hinged on a collage of X-Men and Watchmen ideas, themselves derivative. But ultimately I was most annoyed that, with the purpose of superheroics again represented as selfish power brats squabbling among themselves--indeed striving to save themselves from themselves--the world has been given one more comic-inspired opera of the opinion that superheroes are not just part of the problem, but all of it. Enough. I was very interested in one delightful peripheral character, appearing in about one-and-a-half episodes mid-season: a woman with the stone numbskull power of sending email with her mind. I am certain that this is the type of ability a miracle of genetic mutation would saddle me with. So I'm very interested in that character's heartbreakingly preposterous cantrip, and how it possibly enriches our world. [Cavin]