For a while, people -- not just critics, but the show's creators, too -- were going around claiming that "The Wire" is like a novel. What can this mean, except that the series is not like what most of us think of as TV? Specifically, it's not like the cop show you're picturing as I tell you that "The Wire" is about the Major Case Squad in the Baltimore Police Department and the black drug dealers it tries to bring down. The series is complex, with a lot of characters, and it's never going to hold your hand through each season's story line. You have to pay attention, even when you're not sure what's going on. But since a novel may or may not share these qualities, since a novel can be just about any kind of story these days, it might help to know that "The Wire" is also not like, say, a Dickens novel. It indulges in neither sentimentality nor moral goading. (mc disagrees? complains of the praise for what its 'hysterical realism' ~ that it is hysterically pessimistic ~ ?)
I have good associations with Laura Miller (though wasn't there at lst one article of hers wh I was not into her view? on a book probably) and this encourages them, since yes exactly a novel (if not in its earlier 'historical' conception ~ specifications, than at least "these days" now that its 'form' has been 'challenged' or subverted or whatever and it basically is a book that one does not call non-fiction and presents as a whole) can be many kinds of story, as can tv.
this is one of my what? not to say pet peeves. standing irks. what gets me hot under the collar:
--free will v determinism dumbness (so, junior paper: The Freedom of Merit and of Fault without complaint).
--force v matter dichotomy dumbness.
--description v explanation dumbness.
which is sort of a name for above, argued under both names in junior lab re Newton etc, I remember dB with me against the rest in discussion re Maxwell paper: there's not something called "cause" that is at base any different from a "this then that" description. nonetheless dB also agreed when I said -later, in chicago- maybe my issue against these dichotomies as sloppy thinking is somewhat wrong bcs too abstract, I do not appreciate lived experience, people experience some things as causes and therefore by analogy some descriptions as categorically different, causal? but not to me. bcs IN THOUGHT there is no categorical difference. maybe I dunno sth like that.
all the same issue. that fundamentally this dichotomy is not thinkable. you do not ever explain. you always 'only' describe. you get more local, or closer to a sequence of events that is familiar as a cause, a mechanism. but - yes Hume - you are always just saying: a ship same over the sea. rolling metal ball 1 touched metal ball 2 and metal ball 2 started rolling.
and matter or force just different descriptions. can think matter IS force: where you experience resistance, where your eye sees a boundary.
and you can't be free in sense of undetermined, if you are anything at all, you are something to begin with. you can't make a choice without an inclination and you can't have an inclination without being something already distinct wh is to say determinate (though no not ness determined BY something)
oh and don't say necessarily unless you mean it. don't say something is necessary unless you know specifically what you are saying it is necessary for, and that what wld not be possible without the necessary thing. got me?
ok we could call this my bugbear. intellectual code (I like Abe's"hot under the collar" bit about having to have a moral code. "Mine's that I'm against the burning of witches. Whenever they burn a witch I get all hot under the collar.")
what gets me going is dichotomies that I see like I see through and am impatient to the point of incredulity that other people don't see their disappearance (that the dichotomy does not hold). always that.
I'm against WHAT IS NOT NECESSARY. and esp, assuming what is not even true. (ie I am for necessity, logical as otherwise. be exacting be specific. I really want you to be.)
--AND, as at hand: assumptions about what a novel is, what tv is.
as if can't tell various kinds of stories thr various mediums.
manifests esp as someone assuming all tv-watching is mindless entertainment, though one cld watch a tv show thoughtfully and be challenged, just as one cld read a book as diversion and not be.
and now back to Laura Miller re The Wire
Each season has a social theme -- FIRST SEASON the failure of the war on drugs, SECOND SEASON at the docks the collapse of labor unions, THIRD SEASON the hash of local politics and, last time around, FOURTH SEASON the crippled public school system -- but "The Wire" lacks the Victorian naiveté to believe that any of us will be sufficiently riled up by these tragedies to do anything about them, or that we'd succeed if we tried.
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