From the Archives - Sting’s Lyrical Blunders

Introduction

About fifteen years ago, my brother emailed me a blog post by Charles Petzold about a fairly major goof in Sting’s lyrics to “Don’t Stand So Close to Me.”  The essay had to do with Sting’s allusion to the book Lolita, and the age of Vladimir Nakobov’s evil pedophile character, Humbert Humbert. Sting refers to Humbert as “the old man,” but he simply isn’t old. Petzold’s post also recounts a more widespread criticism of the song, which is Sting’s inane rhyming of “Nabokov” with “cough.”

What follows is my original response to my brother (which I’ve fleshed out a bit for this presumably larger audience). But first, some background.

Highlights of Petzold’s post

Petzold’s blog post begins by quickly recounting the botched rhyme in Sting’s lyrics:

The music magazine Blender recently cited Sting as the worst lyricist ever (story here), in part for the atrocious lyric [It’s no use, he sees her/ He starts to shake and cough/ Just like the old man in/ That book by Nabokov]. At the time the song first came out, much was made of Sting’s ridiculous pronunciation of Vladimir Nabokov’s last name, which should properly be accented on the second syllable.

Then Petzold takes Sting to task for suggesting that Nabokov’s antihero is old:

The “old man” — the narrator of [Lolita] who adopts the pseudonym Humbert Humbert — is hardly old! In May 1947, when Humbert Humbert first meets Dolores Haze, he is 36 or 37 and she is 12. He dies at the age of 42, and she dies at the age of 17. This is not a matter of “inside knowledge” or reading between the lines. Nabokov is extremely precise in the chronology of the novel, and only the most superficial reading (or, more likely in this case, none at all) could [miss] all the signposts.

My commentary, informed by my long study of Nabokov’s work and the two years of Russian I took in high school, elaborates on both gaffs.

Sting’s Lyrical Blunders – October 11, 2007

Petzold makes good points. I have long been bothered by that mispronunciation (made all the worse for its being the very last word of the song). For years, when I’d sing this (e.g., in the shower), I would change the lyrics to “just like the old man in that book by Vladimir.” This fixes the meter, in that the great writer’s name isn’t accentuated on the wrong syllable, but of course my substitution fouls up the rhyme. Not that Sting’s rhyme was exactly right to begin with; “Nabokov” is correctly pronounced “Na-BOH-kov,” with the final letter being basically a “v” sound, perhaps slightly closer to an “f” than the classic English “v” but in any event a poor match with the simple “f” sound in “cough.”

So, to fix both the meter and the rhyme, and the age while I’m at it, here’s how I will sing the last two lines from now on:

It’s no use, he sees her
He’s feeling really queer
Just like the gross man in
That book by Vladimir

I suppose I’m not on completely safe ground with “Vladimir,” since a very strict Russian pronunciation would accentuate the second syllable, which would have a bit more of an “e” sound, so the word would more properly rhyme with “redeemer.” But I think enough Americans say “VLAD-i-mere” that this is a significant improvement.

Now, in case you’re wondering if it’s fair to say Humbert Humbert felt “queer,” I think it certainly is. At one point late in the novel, when Lolita is starting to distance herself from Humbert, he describes how “I sat down on the grass with a quite monstrous pain in my chest and vomited up a torrent of browns and greens that I had never remembered eating.” That would be a pretty queer feeling indeed (and in any case I don’t remember Humbert shaking and coughing at any point in the book).

What’s arguably even lamer than the rhyme itself is Sting’s effort to defend himself. His website, sting.com, provides this quote (taken from an interview):

Okay, I can defend that. Sometimes rhymes can be so bad they can shock you into listening to them. Most good, full rhymes are just Hallmark card stuff. Moon, June, erm, balloon. But I’ve used that terrible, terrible rhyme technique a few times. Technically, it’s called a feminine rhyme—where it’s so appalling it’s almost humorous.

Okay, let me get this straight: Sting deliberately mispronounced “Nabokov,” to make it rhyme with “cough,” just to shock the listener into listening? What was the listener doing before? Zoning out? Listening to something else? Yeah, right. “Don’t Stand So Close to Me” is actually a rather good song, and this is the very end of it; if there was any need to shock the reader into listening, that would more appropriately be done closer to the beginning.

Meanwhile, the bit about “feminine rhyme” further showcases Sting’s appalling willingness to shamelessly spout bullshit without regard to the possibility that he’ll be fact-checked. “Feminine rhyme” is not characterized by being appalling or shocking. As M.H. Abrams explains in his excellent Glossary of Literary Terms, a feminine rhyme “consists of a stressed syllable followed by an unstressed syllable” and, “since it involves the repetition of two syllables, is also known as a double rhyme.” Examples would be feather/heather and ending/bending. Does this type of rhyme get employed in pop music? Sure! Check out these lines from Eminem:

Yo! His palms are sweaty, knees weak, arms are heavy
There’s vomit on his sweater already: Mom’s spaghetti

Feminine rhyme is what Sting should have employed, since “Nabokov” is a word whose final syllable is unstressed. What Sting actually made was a masculine rhyme, which “consists of a single stressed syllable” such as in bore/poor and louche/douche. If he wished to employ a feminine rhyme in order to achieve metrical accuracy, Sting should have rhymed Nabokov with “fuck off.”

A final note on the botched rhyme and Sting’s lame defense of it: twice on one page of sting.com, Nabokov is spelled “Nabakov.” This further suggests that Sting simply didn’t know how to pronounce the name; obviously, flubbing the penultimate syllable wasn’t necessary in order to achieve the single (masculine) rhyme with “cough.”

Getting to Petzold’s main point, the inaccuracy of “old man” in the final verse of that song: this hadn’t previously dawned on me, and it’s a very good observation. I suppose I’ve allowed the casting in the two Lolita movies to distort my perception of Humbert’s age (and shame on me, because I’ve read that book at least three or four times). Of course, Sting was pretty young when he wrote that song, but was he young enough to think of 36 as old? Well, we can do some rudimentary math here based on the line “this girl is half his age.” If we assume this is high school, the girl is between 14 and 18. (On his website, Sting recalls how “I’d done teaching practice at secondary schools and been through the business of having 15-year-old girls fancying me—and me really fancying them!” Eww.) So the narrator of the song is presumably around 30. Perhaps a little kid would think 36 is old, but not a 30-year-old.

I suppose Sting could try to argue that he meant “old man” as in “father,” as Humbert was in fact Lolita’s legal stepfather for most of the book. But would he really expect all his listeners to have read the book to know that? Besides, it’d be “her old man,” not “that old man.” No dice.

As a final Hail Mary, Sting could always deny that he was talking about the book Lolita at all—after all, there are plenty of shaking and coughing old men in Nabokov’s books. This would be a weak defense, of course, given the subject matter of the song, but there’s still hope: Sting could claim that he was alluding to The Enchanter, a Nabokov novella that’s also about a pedophile (and was an early precursor to Lolita). I can’t recall the age of its awful protagonist, but at least he is described as “balding.” But from the perspective of that hypothetical defense, Sting nullified it when he recorded a new version of the song in 1986 and changed “that book by Nabokov” to “that famous book by Nabokov.” I doubt anybody would call The Enchanter a famous book. And in interviews Sting has mentioned his admiration of Lolita.

I think it’s appropriate that Sting topped the list of awful lyricists. I saw a documentary about him from 1985, and he just came off as a pompous ass. In one scene, Sting asks his drummer or somebody whether “chasm” is pronounced with a “k” sound or a “ch” sound. This makes me wonder if he really writes his own lyrics to begin with. I mean, who would use a word he doesn’t even know how to pronounce? Oh, wait ... Sting, obviously.

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Better Bridal Registry Ideas

Introduction

I’m not a big fan of bridal registries. Why should I be, when I’ll never be a bride? When my wife and I married we didn’t do a registry. I thought it was outdated even then, like dowries, and that was 27 years ago. But with wedding season upon us, and this tradition not going away (as much as it may morph, e.g., registering for cash, for trips, for “experiences,” for charities, etc.) I’m here to suggest some improvements.

Before we begin

I think there should be a rule that couples who live together before marriage don’t get to register. They’ve taken the fun out of everything by starting early on playing house. Part of the excitement of getting married should be no longer eating off mismatched plates and silverware (well, flatware) from Goodwill.

Limit the registry

About a quarter century ago, when I went to weddings seemingly every weekend, I sometimes found registries helpful because I often barely knew the couple and had no idea what they’d want. This is because work colleagues would invite the entire office, perhaps to pad their guest list so as to make the wedding more impressive or something. In this case I’d race to the online registry to try to snap up the cheap items like the $30 washcloths before they were all gone. Once I visited a registry way too late and all I found were grotesquely overpriced items—I distinctly remember a $80 porcelain butter dish, with a lid and everything. Who uses these items? I guess I had a butter dish long ago before it broke. It was under a dollar at Goodwill and looked strangely similar to the $80 one.

That being said, the better move would be to have a smaller wedding and assume therefore that most guests know you well enough to choose something thoughtful. Then, for people who are just congenitally terrible at choosing, you have a limited registry of affordable things. But instead of choosing a specific SKU to get just the make, model, and style you want, be more vague. Then your guests can hunt for a bargain instead of Williams Sonoma having them by the balls.

To make wedding planning easier, I’m providing a large handful of can’t-lose items that for the most part are pretty affordable. These recommendations are based on what I’ve enjoyed having, or wished I had, over my long and happy marriage.

Item #1 – Pasta machine

This has traditionally been my go-to gift for my guy friends who got married. Most of them are cyclists and thus in love with giant starchy meals and cool mechanical apparatuses.

This also seems like a nice wedding gift because cooking together is, or ought to be, a fun thing for any couple to do. Full disclosure: I haven’t actually made that much pasta with my wife, but my kids love making it with me, which gives my wife a break from cooking. (I’m not suggesting that this traditional arrangement is the way to go for all or most couples, by the way. It just happens to be ours.)

Item #2 – Zip-together sleeping bags

If the happy couple doesn’t already have zip-together sleeping bags, they totally should. What an amazing invention. You actually end up with more room than in a standard bag, because you have each other for warmth. Standard sleeping bags are designed to be a very close fit, for warmth, and I find them claustrophobic. If this gift seems too pricey, go in with another couple on it. Just be sure to sync up the left vs. right bags!

Now, you may object that not all couples like to camp. Well, here’s the thing: maybe they don’t, but if they have kids, they’re going to get dragged into campouts eventually. That’s just the way it is. So why not be prepared? Here is a chilling true story: we camped with several other families once, and one didn’t have any camping gear so they rented it. Well, whoever picked up the gear royally screwed up and unknowingly got the child-sized “Tigger” bags for everyone. They didn’t discover this until they turned in. They were good sports at first, but this was in the spring and it got really cold that night. The damn bags came up to, like, their waists. At like 3 a.m. our entire group was awakened by the sound of the couple having a major shouting match. They were freezing their asses off and furious. The one who got the wrong bags was obviously lambasted at length, but reasonably countered that the other hadn’t lifted a finger to help. They made it through the night but left in a huff first thing in the morning, instead of staying a second night like the rest of us. They are now divorced.

Item #3 – Sonicare electric toothbrush

If the happy couple doesn’t have this, they need it. Everybody does. If they do have a Sonicare, buy them a bunch of replacement heads—those are expensive. Look, this may seem hopelessly quotidian, but let’s face facts: when the blush of new love starts to mellow, and the spouses (spice?) start to get more critical of each other, they should at least have beautiful white teeth and good breath. This becomes more important in the third decade of marriage when their hair is going grey, the guy may be going bald, and their skin starts to wrinkle … they can still have great teeth.

But the real reason a Sonicare is such a good gift has to do with the next item on my list.

Item #4 – Chip clip

You know what the problem is with wedding registries? The couple goes on a little shopping spree through the kind of high-end department store that is all too happy to offer a free registry service, and they imagine themselves being all fabulous with their exquisite china, fancy-pants silverware (well, flatware), $80 butter dishes, etc. and none of this has to do with the actual, humble day-to-day business of being a married couple. The china gathers dust on a shelf, the flatware is bogus because it’s too weird so they get sick of it plus for some reason it’s not supposed to go through the dishwasher, and the butter dish is broken immediately and this seems like a tragedy based on its price tag, when really nobody should care because butter dishes are practically useless.

Enter the chip clip. Look, I know we shouldn’t even be eating chips because they’re not good for us, so any kitchen gadget that encourages such behavior should, arguably, be shunned. But this is the gift that says hey, maybe we don’t care and we’re gonna be naughty sometimes, indulge in this guilty pleasure, and the chip clip is how to be unapologetic about this. (Growing up, my family never, ever had chips around, unless maybe someone was about to throw out the rest of a bag at a swim team picnic and we inherited it. Thus, the first time I saw a chip clip, at my friend John’s house, I was enchanted.)

But wait, there’s more. Part of being a happily—dare I say proudly—married couple is running a particularly ship-shape household through sheer ingenuity and a can-do attitude. That’s where the Sonicare comes in. When you wear out a toothbrush head, you can salvage the incredibly powerful magnet from it and put it on your fridge. These magnets are so powerful you can remove them only by sliding them to the edge of the fridge. You can magnet anything to your fridge and it won’t slide down.

How does that involve the chip clip? Break the original magnet off of it—this is the weak magnet that can only support the weight of the chip clip itself—and replace it with the Sonicare magnet. Now you can clip the whole damn bag of chips right to your fridge! It’s totally awesome!

Still not sold on this, based on how very humble such a gift would seem to the recipient? Not to worry, I’m sure Tiffany sells a sterling silver chip clip for like $8,000.

Item #5 – the “I haf nofing!” bowl

Surely there will be somebody at your wedding who just loves giving beautiful gifts and will want to splurge on something. So it was for my wife and me: a college friend of hers surprised us with an absolutely beautiful leaded crystal serving bowl. Look:

We do use this bowl from time to time, and I’m always struck by its loveliness. I wash it with extreme care, always remembering the scene in Vladimir Nabokov’s excellent novel Pnin in which the protagonist, a poor émigré professor, cleans up after a dinner party. This party was supposed to celebrate his getting tenure, but he has just learned that actually he’s been let go. He morosely ponders this as he cleans his own beautiful serving bowl:

He prepared a bubble bath in the sink for the crockery, glass, and silverware, and with infinite care lowered the aquamarine bowl into the tepid foam. Its resonant flint glass emitted a sound full of muffled mellowness as it settled down to soak… He gathered the wiped spoons into a posy, placed them in a pitcher which he had washed but not dried, and then took them out one by one and wiped them all over again. He groped under the bubbles, around the goblets, and under the melodious bowl, for any piece of forgotten silver—and retrieved a nutcracker. Fastidious Pnin rinsed it, and was wiping it, when the leggy thing somehow slipped out of the towel and fell like a man from a roof. He almost caught it—his fingertips actually came into contact with it in mid-air, but this only helped to propel it into the treasure-concealing foam of the sink, where an excruciating crack of broken glass followed upon the plunge.

Now, here’s where the novel and my memory of it diverge: in my version, Pnin cries out in anguish, “I haf nofing left, nofing!” In actuality, he utters this line at another point in the book. No matter: on this (mistaken) basis I long ago nicknamed our beautiful bowl the “I haf nofing bowl.” My wife calls it this, too—and isn’t this shared private language one of the joys of marriage?

(Well, not entirely private. My kids are vaguely aware of this moniker; when I took the bowl down to photograph it today, my younger daughter called it “the Pnin bowl.”)

Item #6 – Anniversary card 50-pack

This product doesn’t actually exist, so you’ll need to do a Kickstarter or something. I’m not talking about a boxed set of small cards for people who keep track of all their friends’ anniversaries. I’m talking about lavish, full-sized cards for the partners to give each other. This can help in three ways. First, it would save time because it’s tough to find good anniversary cards as so many weddings are in June and must compete with wedding, graduation and Father’s Day cards. Second, by giving the couple a 50-pack, you’re expressing your faith that their marriage will last. Finally, you’re mitigating the risk that one of the parties will forget to buy a card until it’s too late … so you’re safeguarding the marriage!

Item #7 – Subscription to albertnet

This might seem like a pretty skimpy gift, since obviously anybody can view albertnet for free from any Internet-connected device. But this requires the would-be reader to remember that this blog exists, which so far almost nobody does. But a limited number of people can have each post emailed to them automatically, the instant it goes live. How much is this worth? Well … how much ya got?

Full disclosure: this feature doesn’t always work. In fact, I can’t say it even usually works. The emails will go out just fine for a few weeks, and then they mysteriously stop. The one shown above, from last November, is the last one that went out. So, maybe this particular gift isn’t such a great idea after all…

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Non-Race Non-Report - 2021 Fort Ord CCCX XC MTB

Vlog

It occurred to me that some of my readers might be the types who unconsciously mouth the words they’re reading, as though they were reading aloud, and that others might be the type who turn their entire heads instead of just moving their eyes to track along the lines of text. Either of these types of people might get mocked while reading my blog, and I don’t want that. Meanwhile, still other people (I’m told) simply prefer a video. Thus,  I’m providing the vlog format here, and for everyone else the text follows below.

Introduction

It’s become a tradition for me, at this time of year, to head to Fort Ord in the Monterey area and do a mountain bike race. Normally, I’m a high school cycling coach and this is an opportunity for my riders to watch me suffer. But this year the NorCal League and our team are shut down due to the pandemic, so we didn’t get to go. And this means I don’t get to blog about my wretched, ill-fated race … another tradition stymied.

For a moment, I considered embracing the fake-news zeitgeist and writing a purportedly true but actually totally fabricated race report. After all, as we already knew but formally learned by watching The Social Dilemma, false information is much more interesting than the truth. But I couldn’t bring myself to do it. Then I considered doing a short story, but in my experience, people seem to prefer their fiction be labeled fact.

What follows is a completely honest report of the race I didn’t do (inspired, perhaps, by a story I dimly recall from the early ‘90s called “We Didn’t,” by Stuart Dybek). In accordance with the high standard set by my bike team for race/ride reports, I focus on the food, and provide the report in various versions, starting concisely before waxing verbose.

Executive summary

• We didn’t have our annual team dinner in the windowless back room of the Monterey Brewhouse (slogan: “We’re actually in Salinas”)
• The GPS didn’t direct me to a lonely stretch of a desolate road in the middle of nowhere only to announce, “You have arrived”
• No student laughed so hard a French fry came out his nose
• The portions weren’t so small I had to beg for the shrapnel from my daughter’s plate; after all, she’s off at college now and the meal never happened
• At the team tent that wasn’t erected in the morning, nobody forgot to bring the coffee, thus the lack of coffee was actual
• During the non-race non-warm-up, I didn’t fail to secure a student’s bike properly to the trainer, thus he couldn’t literally crash at zero mph
• All the training I didn’t do never had a chance to not pay off
• The race did not knock the stuffing out of anybody because there was no race and no stuffing
• I did not make an endless speech afterward, during which the parents clapped politely and the teenagers suffered silently
• When I didn’t return home because I hadn’t gone anywhere, I did not pour a beer and toast my own robust good health, nor did I drown my sorrows over the loss of my cycling fitness, though that loss (and my beer) are very real

Short report

Race stats: 0.00 miles (vs. 22.4 last year); 0 feet of vertical gain (vs. 2,362 last year); 0:00 race time (vs. 1:41:07 last year); 0.00 mph average speed (vs. 13.3 mph last year). 

Conclusion: I have no reason to believe I will ever again have the fitness necessary to race a bicycle. As far as I can tell, life will not go on—not in any recognizable way. You might say wait, that’s not true, this COVID pandemic shall pass. To which I respond, perhaps. Only perhaps. Consider these words from the writer Vladimir Nabokov: “At best, the ‘future’ is the idea of a hypothetical present based on our experience of succession, on our faith in logic and habit. Actually, of course, our hopes can no more bring [the future] into existence than our regrets change the past.”

Non-Pre-race Dinner (the night before I didn’t race):

• Lamb steaks that were deliciously rare because they caught fire under the broiler and had to be pulled out prematurely
• Mashed potatoes with salted butter and extra salt
• Sautéed zucchini
• German-style purple cabbage
• Rocky road ice cream with hot fudge because what do I need to be fit and trim for?

Breakfast (on the morning I would have raced)

• Two eggs, scrambled, burnt because I was too impatient to gradually wait for the pan to warm up and instead put a big flame under it so it was too hot—I could tell it was too hot because the butter smoked, and I knew I should hold back the eggs, take the pan off the heat, let it cool, wipe out the burned butter, and start over—but damn it fuck it all I just didn’t care and poured in the eggs in the pan anyway
• Two slices white bread that I thought would be wheat because the package said “Whole Grain Oat Nut” which was a lie but I was caught off-guard because the bread aisle was disorienting because my glasses were fogged up by my mask and I wasn’t at my normal store, where they require a reservation, a temperature test, a long line, a letter from your doctor, and support a maximum occupancy of like five, and I’m only slightly exaggerating
• An apple that just wasn’t very good because see above

During the non-race: nothing but half a bottle of water because my legs just kind of petered out halfway up South Park because I’m just so tired from the work week since my colleagues, newbies at teleworking, take all the time they would be commuting and pour it into working more, which in a perfect world would help everybody finish early, but instead everyone just launches more projects, generates more deliverables, and creates an overall culture that brings to mind that study NASA did of spiders given too much caffeine.

Unnecessary glycogen window treat: more ice cream because it’s so rare to have it around the house and even with one daughter no longer around, I better get the ice cream while I can; also a macaron that my daughter made, from a recipe that was incredibly complicated and took like a day but then a) the cookie was amazing, and b) what else is she gonna do with her time?

Full report

To my discredit, I was not very successful in looking around at the start and deciding who the fastest guy was likely to be, because there was no start line and no racers, not even myself. As soon as the race did not start, I didn’t get right on the wheel of the fastest guy, but if I had, he would have passed everybody during the slight uphill asphalt run-up to the dirt. I would have hit the single-track in second position, and then died on the guy’s wheel for a few minutes, and then the single-minded, sport-obsessed, totally unbalanced evil tech titan quasi-retired uber-fit bike bastards would have started passing me. It would have been a long race, four or five laps, and my strategy would have been to pace myself and wait for the guys ahead to start detonating so I could pass them.

If I were in racing form this year, that would make uphills a blast, obviously. I could be at the CCCX race and see a horrible 12% grade looming ahead, and I’d think, “Yeah! Bring it!” I’d look at the guys around me with something like pity. But of course I’m not in racing form; why would I be? I’m taking this shelter-in-place opportunity to develop the physique better suited to my current lifestyle: more like the shape of a Coke botte, or a bowling pin, or those inflatable clown bop bags or a Weeble that may wobble but it won’t fall down. That would stabilize me in my desk chair. Maybe if I can add some flesh to my face, I won’t look so gaunt, and thus so old, and after all nothing below my waist shows on a videoconference so why not develop a big soft woman-y butt? Perhaps an extra fifteen or twenty pounds would give me an air of gravitas.

Anyway, notwithstanding my new COVID physique, the non-race wasn’t too bad. I mean, how bad could it have been? I did find that on the climbs I wasn’t doing that I could, or perhaps couldn’t, put the hurt on any of the people who weren’t there. I’d heard these climbs described as “really long” but they seemed really short, as in actually literally nonexistent. It was a fun race, if only in my mind. But that’s actually overstating things. The race did not exist even in a reverie … this is the first time I’ve thought of it even hypothetically.

It’s been rainy in the Bay Area so there would have been several very deep puddles on the course that we’d have bombed through, sending water gushing up everywhere like one of those amusement park water rides. Oddly, only my trailing foot would get splashed. By the end of the race I would have had a drenched left foot and a bone-dry right foot.

On the last lap of my race, had there been one, I might well saw have seen this guy I’d remembered from the previous years’ races whom I’d have been chasing for the whole race (though most of the time he’d have been too far ahead to even see). His jersey would have said something pompous like “Woodside Beasts,” or some other rival high school team, meaning he’d be a coach too. I’d have started to close in on him on the final climb, right toward the end of the race. It would’ve looked like I wasn’t gaining fast enough and that he’d hold me off, except that I’d have been able to tell he was just dying.

I’d have dug deep, deeper, and deepest, and literally 50 feet from the end of the climb I’d have finally passed him. Damn, what a sucker-punch that would have been! He’d still be pissed off about it! The tricky part would have been holding him off on the fast, technical descent to the finish line. I’m not that great a downhiller because my wife would kill me if I crashed, but I’d have gone for broke, and presently on a narrow single-track section I’d have come up on a young high school girl who wouldn’t have been going that fast. I’d have realized that if I got stuck behind her, the Beast would catch up and surely pass me in the twisty bits near the finish line. On the other hand, there would be no place to pass except the thick bramble alongside the trail. Bramble is a notoriously tricky surface to ride on, because the ground can be really bumpy, even rock-infested, beneath the brush, and you won’t know until you’re on it. You could run over a rock, a beer bottle, a human skull, an empty bottle of hand sanitizer, maybe even a landmine because what the hell, this is all speculation anyway. I’d have taken the gamble, and though it would’ve been indeed bumpy—my bike would have heaved like a bucking bronco—I’d have made it past the girl, returned to the single-track, and never saw the Beast again.

After the finish line, feeling truly shattered, I would have been filled with the sublime feeling of having truly given it everything, so it wouldn’t have mattered how I’d placed—which would be good, because I would really have no idea about that. It’s better that way, I think, to decide how it went without worrying about the more or less meaningless matter of how I compared to those who happened to show up and race my category. Had they actually shown up. And had I.

But instead of being at peace no matter the result, I feel only a gap, a void, a lack, a profound sense of nothingness, the absence of any feeling about the race because there was no race, there was no course, there was no pit zone, there were no team tents or trailers, there was no podium and there was nobody there at all at Fort Ord, in the gentle dunes that would have been the course. Well, to be really accurate, surely there were hawks, and rodents, and earthworms, and it’s possible one or more of these creatures perceived something different this year, no groaning of cars and trucks and racers, no whirring and clunking of chains, no ticking of freewheels, no static-sound of tires on dirt, no cheering, no PA system, no nothing. This year, there was only—to quote the poet Peter Kane Dufault—“one huge hush the whole day.”

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Ask an English Major

Dear English Major,

Why don’t they call it Literature Major? I mean, it’s not like you’re learning to speak the language or something.

Brandy F, Phoenix, AZ

Dear Brandy,

That seems like a fair question. Of course, “literature” could be in any language, so at least “English” makes it clear. “English literature” was probably the full name of the major and was it eventually shortened. If it had been shortened to “literature,” people would further shorten it to “lit,” and there would be terrible puns around drunkenness. But the truth is, I just don’t know. The origin of “English” as the name of the major isn’t something they taught us in the major.

Dear English Major,

I have this uppity English-major friend who insists the name of the Lolita author is pronounced Nuh-BOH-kov, but we all know from the Police song that it’s NAH-bah-kov. Is my friend just putting on airs?

Jack H, Buffalo, NY

Dear Jack,

I hate to break it to you, but your friend is right. The author himself, when asked in an interview, explained that the accent falls in the middle, and says of the English pronunciation, with the accent on the first syllable, “The awful ‘Na-bah-kov’ is a despicable gutterism.” When I get the Police song in my head, I can’t resist changing it from “It’s no use/ He sees her/ He starts to shake and cough/ Just like the/ Old man in/ That book by Nabokov” to “It’s no use/ He sees her/ He’s really acting queer/ Just like the / Old man in/ That book by Vladimir.” Of course, this only works with the English pronunciation of “Vladimir.” Nabokov says it should rhyme with “redeemer.”

Dear English Major,

Why are you always correcting people’s grammar? It’s really annoying.

Lisa M, Seattle, WA

Dear Lisa,

Why do I always get accused of that? I never correct people’s grammar. People seem to lay that on me for no good reason. Maybe they’re afraid that I will correct them, because they know I could. But I don’t, and I don’t think many English majors do. Truth be told, we aren’t taught much, if any, grammar in this major. I happen to have impeccable grammar because I care about it, but that was true before I went to college.

Dear English Major,

How do you hide your smugness and air of intellectual superiority when thrown in with a bunch of Business majors?

Paul B, Iowa City, IA

Dear Paul,

I sense that your question is either sarcastic, or some kind of trap. Let’s talk about this face to face over a beer sometime.

Dear English Major,

I was a panelist at a workshop recently on building executive function in teenagers. During the meet-and-greet I introduced myself as John Morse, and then the next panelist glared at me and introduced himself as “Joe Blow, he/him/his.” What the hell was that all about?

John Morse, Oakland, CA

Dear John,

Joe Blow was surely using a shorthand for the more complete introduction, “My name is Joe Blow and my gender pronouns are he/him/his.” He was conveying his Preferred Gender Pronouns (PGPs) as described here. It is becoming more common, particularly in progressive communities, to provide these in advance so nobody needs to worry about offending you by getting your pronouns wrong due to an automatic assumption about your chosen gender identity.

I have no problem with the embrace of PGPs in language, as it’s a movement that means well, but I do think it rude of Joe Blow to glare at you. Setting somebody up to guess wrong about your chosen gender identity seems like a victimless crime to me, since it’s still statistically unlikely this panelist would need to employ a pronoun at all when referring to you. I mean, how long does the panel discussion last? Couldn’t he just say “I think John’s point is that…” rather than “I think his point is that…”? Also, is it the end of the world if he guesses wrong about your pronoun and you have to gently correct him?

Personally, I’m tempted to say, next time I’m introducing myself, “My name is Dana and my personal pronouns are she/him/their.” But of course I wouldn’t actually do this. I’d hate to offend anybody.

Dear English Major,

A degree in English? What are you going to do with that?”

Ken S, Broomfield, CO

Dear Ken,

Your question would be much more appropriate if I were still in college and my future were a great unknown. But actually, I graduated long ago, but still use the label “English major.” To say “English graduate” just sounds weird, doesn’t it? Funny, isn’t it, how a law student graduates and becomes a lawyer, and a medical student graduates and becomes a doctor, but an English major graduates and doesn’t really get to call himself anything? I guess that’s kind of your point.

Anyway, I fielded this question a lot back in college, and it’s a pity the movie “Napoleon Dynamite” hadn’t come out yet because then I could have answered, “Whatever I feel like. Gosh!” Anyway, you need to learn not to ask English majors this question, because you’ll probably work for one of us someday. Myself, I own a home and drive a pretty cool car. So lay off.

Dear English Major,

What do you do when somebody corrects your grammar?

Kathleen Templeton, NYC

Dear Kathleen,

I don’t know, because that has never happened. Some advice columnists seem to enjoy falling on their swords as a show of humility, but that strikes me as irresponsible. I don’t get corrected because I don’t make mistakes. That’s why I get to dispense advice.

That being said, I have been put on the defensive by someone claiming I’ve made an error when I actually haven’t. For example, my dad was once emailing a friend of his about my blog, explaining that he (my dad) didn’t tend to read it because my posts are too long. (He reckoned that the post I was running that week would, if printed, comprise 29.3 pages.) In his email he pointed out something he construed as an error on my blog: “It would be fun to tease [Dana] about ‘That’s me’ as opposed to the grammatically correct ‘That’s I’ [in the sentence ‘That’s me with my friend Dan.’]”

Right off the bat, I have to question my dad’s use of the hypothetical subjunctive—“It would be fun”—when in fact he clearly was teasing me by copying me on this email. But my main issue was his simpleminded assumption that punctiliously correct grammar is always appropriate when communicating informally with a specific audience. I replied as follows: “Rest assured that what you took for a grammatical error was a conscious stylistic decision to use the colloquial ‘that’s me.’ I figured that particular post would get a lot of pageviews from dumb jocks, who would not realize that ‘That’s I’ is actually correct, and would be distracted by the correct construction. If you look at some of the comments readers posted, you'll see I likely guessed right.” I went on to correct my dad’s math about the length of the post. It actually ran only 6½ printed pages, not the 29.3 he erroneously calculated. Take that, Dad!

Dear English Major,

With all this emphasis on STEM, I don’t think there’s any way to convince my kid to pursue a Liberal Arts degree. When people, particularly the STEM types, ask you why you majored in English, what do you tell them?

Monique R, Portland, OR

Dear Monique,

Honestly, when faced with this question, my stock reply is, “Well, frankly, I knew it would be an easy major for me. You see, I grew up speaking English at home.”

I know this isn’t that funny, and it’s certainly evasive, but I just don’t think the STEM types can be easily convinced. You either grasp the value of the Liberal Arts, or you don’t. I feel bad for those who head for these dependably lucrative fields because they’re afraid of ending up poor and miserable. To me this indicates a pitiable lack of swagger.

If pressed on this topic, I’ll sometimes quote from the commencement address delivered by a former professor of mine, the bestselling writer Maxine Hong Kingston. (Because I went through the ceremony in May, but actually finished up that December, I was able to get a copy of the speech from Maxine herself—with her own handwritten notes in the margin.) When hassled by others for her choice of English as a major, she said something to the effect of, “Look, I didn’t treat college like a vocational school. I got the degree of an aristocrat.” (I don’t have the transcript handy so I can’t quote her directly, but you get the idea.)

I won’t deny that there are people who truly love math, engineering, or writing software. My brother was one of them, and he dove headfirst into programming because he just loved it. This was in junior high when he surely wasn’t thinking whatsoever about his future. But you’d never have had a conversation with him about STEM vs. English; he would have been too busy coding. But for those who don’t truly love math and science, to pursue a “practical” major that will “set them up to thrive in the new information economy” etc. seems like a recipe for frustration and unhappiness.

Dear English Major,

Can you recommend ten great novels for me?

Sarah Winslow, Minneapolis, MN

Dear Sarah,

I’m flattered you would ask me that, when the Internet is replete with recommended reading lists. But this is a tough request because I don’t even know you, so it’s hard to guess at what you’d enjoy. My wife, who is (well, was) also an English major, loves a lot of the same books I do, but would also hate a number of my favorites. For example, I love the relaxed pace and meandering style of T.R. Pearson’s Off for the Sweet Hereafter, but I know it would try my wife’s patience.

So, with that lengthy caveat, I will try to cobble together a list, knowing that as soon as this goes to press I’ll think of ten more books that are more deserving. I see that I already gave you one title, so here are nine others in no particular order. 

• The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy
• Pnin by Vladimir Nabokov
• A Hero of Our Time by Mikhail Lermontov
• My Antonia by Willa Cather
• The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
• The Third Policeman by Flann O’Brien
• Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
• The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark
• Kim by Rudyard Kipling

It seems ridiculous not to include Anna Karenina in that list, but it’s almost 900 pages long. Are you really going to read anything that thick?

An English Major is a syndicated journalist whose advice column, “Ask an English Major,” appears in over 0 blogs worldwide.

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Famous Last Words

NOTE: This post is rated R for mild strong language.

Introduction

I had the unfortunate opportunity recently to hear somebody’s last words. As in, on his deathbed. I suspect that few people’s last words are memorable, or at least get remembered. However, I came well prepared for my opportunity as witness, which gratified my longtime fascination with dying words. In this post I’ll explore that fascination with you.

Famous last words

My brother Max and I have discussed this at length. We want to go out saying something impressive. Max declared, “I wouldn’t want to go into death unprepared. I want to have something rehearsed.” Like what? “Well, something like, ‘Stay gold, Ponyboy … stay gold.’” Of course he was joking, as that’s been taken. Myself, I’ve always kept the following quote handy, ready to rattle off whenever I don’t know what else to say: “The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness.” Those are Vladimir Nabokov’s words, but not his last. His last words were, “A certain butterfly is already on the wing.”

Pretty glib, eh? Almost too perfect. And that’s the challenge: to have something queued up in advance, and then to have the lucidity and presence of mind to recall it in your last moment. Adding to the difficulty is that you may not know which moment will be your last. As I’ve discussed with Max, there’s always the Little Big Man scenario: you think the time has come to die, and you make a big speech and everything, and then you unexpectedly go on living for quite some time, making this “final” thing you said a bit of an embarrassment.

There’s also the scenario where you give a nice little speech, thinking it’s the end, but then you live just long enough to spoil it with some other random utterance. This happened to the famous writer Roald Dahl, who had his family gathered around him and said, “You know, I’m not frightened. It’s just that I’ll miss you all so much.” Pretty nice sentiment, but then, as he seemed to lose consciousness, his nurse decided to give him a morphine injection to ease his transition—whereupon Dahl cried out, “Ow, fuck!” And then died. Ow, fuck … famous last words.

Convicted murderers, right before being executed, have a great opportunity to say something memorable. In my extensive study of last words (i.e., reading the entire Wikiquotes entry), I found murderers to be the best represented. They can predict the moment of death beforehand, and they’ve had some time on death row to think of something. James French, just before getting the electric chair, yelled to the assembled press, “Hey fellas! How about this for a headline … ‘French fries!’” Thomas Grasso declared, “I did not get my Spaghetti-O’s; I got spaghetti. I want the press to know this.” Of course, even murderers can screw this moment up. Shannon Charles Thomas gave some long formal statement, but then forgot to shut up afterward. His actual last words: “Is the mic still on?”

Perhaps murderers aren’t whom to look to for the crème de la crème of last words, as these people don’t tend to be well educated and/or or deep thinkers. I’ve found wittier quotes from those executed in the name of politics. Consider Pedro Munoz Seca, a playwright executed during the Spanish Civil War, whose last words, facing a firing squad, were, “I am starting to believe you are not intending to count me amongst your friends.” George Jacques Danton, a French revolutionary famous for his physical ugliness, said just before being beheaded, “Show my head to the people. It is well worth seeing.” But my favorite line comes from James Scott, First Duke of Monmouth, a British nobleman executed on Tower Hill. It was customary in those days to tip the executioner in advance (as a way to ensure good—i.e., swift—service), but Scott refused. Perhaps for that reason, the first blow of the axe landed on his shoulder. He looked up at the executioner and said, “Sir, if you miss like that again, I cannot guarantee that I shall remain still.”

Of course, anybody whose life ends like this has the benefit of an audience which knows it is witnessing somebody’s demise. This audience is prepared in advance to register what is said and may naturally suppose the words will be remarkable—so they’re paying attention. But the death doesn’t need to be deliberate, if there are enough people in attendance. There is very little doubt as to the authenticity of the final words of Mark Sandman, the lead singer of Morphine. Addressing a stadium full of fans at a concert in Palestrina, Italy, he said, “Thank you Palestrina. It’s a wonderful evening, it’s great to be here and I wanna dedicate you a super sexy song.” And then he collapsed of a fatal heart attack.

In contrast, when a famous person dies but not many are around to hear his or her last words, there’s certainly room for error—especially when posterity so badly wants to glorify the memory of the deceased. Perhaps this is how history has recorded so many conflicting (and thus inaccurate) accounts. For example, Groucho Marx is said to have parted with, “This is no way to live!”—but his last utterance is also reported as, “Die, my dear? Why, that's the last thing I'll do!” So which account is correct? At most one, and quite possibly neither. Humphrey Bogart supposedly said, “I should never have switched from scotch to martinis.” But other sources have him leaving off by telling his wife, “Goodbye, kid. Hurry back.” Maybe the thing about martinis was merely toward  the end? Who knows.

Dylan Thomas either said, at the last, “I’ve had 18 straight whiskies … I think that’s the record,” or, “Roses plural or Rose’s with an apostrophe?” The second report, spoken to his girlfriend, strikes me as more authentic (for being less pitch-perfect), but again we can’t really know. Elvis Presley is purported to have made his final utterance, “I’m going to the bathroom to read,” but the more believable account is that he said, “Okay, I won’t,” which gives the more interesting utterance to his fiancée, who (as he headed for the john) warned him,  “Don’t fall asleep in there.”

One apocryphal final utterance that I’m guilty of repeating is that of Tom Simpson, a cyclist who died of a drug overdose during a Tour de France stage. He supposedly said, “Put me back on my bike.” What he actually said was, “Up … up….” Of course that doesn’t make as good a story. Pancho Villa left us a nice touch of irony along these lines, saying at the end, “Don’t let it end like this. Tell them I said something.” Very witty and “meta,” except that, alas, this quote too is apocryphal … nobody knows what his last words actually were.

Other last words can perhaps be better trusted, not because of who was around to remember them, but because they’re memorable without being uttered by a famous person burdened with the responsibility of saying something bright. For example, Louise-Marie-Thérèse de Saint Maurice, Comtesse de Vercellis, reportedly said, “Good. A woman who can fart is not dead.” This was, yes, after letting one rip. That’s just too good to be made up (and if it was untrue, people would surely have spoken up). Another utterance that seems too apropos to have been apocryphal is the final utterance of the surgeon Joseph Henry Green who, upon checking his own pulse, spoke just one word: “Stopped.”

Then we have the case of Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna, whose last words were, “God bless, God damn!” According to Wikiquotes, “He was known to spend many long hours trying to decide what his last words would be; one can only speculate if this is what he had intended to say.” I guess there are worse final proclamations; after all, “God bless, God damn!” was reportedly good enough for James Thurber, a noted wordsmith. (Perhaps Thurber was quoting Santa Anna?)

Where last words are concerned, accurate recall is a two-way street: anybody who might be in the room with the dying could be the only one to hear these words, and may or may not care to commit them to memory, especially if they’re humdrum things. Freddy Mercury, on his deathbed and weak from AIDS, probably didn’t realize his humble and necessarily concise request for help getting to the restroom—“Pee pee”—would be the last thing he ever said. But was it, really? Unless he literally died moments later while getting this assistance, he might have died half an hour or so later, and do we really know he didn’t say some other similarly bland thing during that time?

My father’s last words

Many of my dad’s utterances, toward the end, seemed like candidates for his last words. In these final days, I struggled to remember not only every single thing my dad said, from the profound to the truly banal, but also the sequence in which he said them. After all, I wanted to get this right. There’s a world of difference, to me, between something said toward the end versus the very last thing a person ever said.

When people are gravely ill and thus not of a reliably lucid mind, or even when they’re just bummed out about being terminal, they run the risk of leaving off with something less than totally profound. Agnieszka Osiecka, the Polish writer, said to her children on her deathbed, “Do Dupy,” which translates, “This sucks.” Perhaps she didn’t intend these to be the last words she ever spoke. Similarly, I doubt my dad intended his last word to be “Integers!” which he said quite loudly and emphatically, but apparently to nobody; my brother and I heard it from the next room. But he also said, “Urinal,” because he needed to pee. It vexed me at the time that I could not recall which came first. What if he never said another thing? What if I wouldn’t be able to know his last words for certain?

Hanging on my dad’s every word during those final days seemed a fool’s errand, because nobody could know how long he would last. It seemed he could die any minute, or in the next few hours, or maybe not for days, and possibly a week or more. How long could I go on committing his every verbal output to memory?

There was also the risk that If I didn’t nail down my father’s last words, I might unknowingly invent something. I’m not talking about putting words in his mouth, but about conveniently seizing on something profound, and later recalling it, inaccurately (though inadvertently) as the last thing he said. For example, he did gather my three brothers and me around him toward the end to bid farewell. “Okay boys,” he said, and then paused. So far he was off to a great start. How many times had he addressed us that way? I was almost crying already. 

Then, working to summon the breath needed to continue, our dad cleared his throat and said, “This is the last time I’ll have an audience.” This, because it came from a man who had always enjoyed an audience, was profound. But now he was truly running out of breath, and mental clarity, and only managed to finish up with: “Bye-bye.” And this could have been it, and though it’s not a total zinger, it does have a nice sense of closure, perhaps not worthy of My Dinner with Andre, but more than good enough.

But I knew this might not be his final utterance. I stayed focused, because if I didn’t catch whatever he said next, I’d forget that next thing, and fall back on the last thing I did remember—i.e., the “bye-bye” speech. And that wouldn’t be fair to my dad. Make no mistake about it: the last words should be remembered exactly—not for the benefit of the audience, but for the benefit of the dead.

A bit later our dad said some very nice things to Max, that I could probably remember pretty much verbatim if I thought hard (and which deserve to committed to memory, I suppose), but I know for a fact these weren’t my dad’s last words. He was going to go around and give a final benediction to each of us, and you’d better believe I’d have paid close attention and made sure to immortalize whatever he said specifically to me—but he never got to it. He ran out of steam. And the really crazy part is that I can’t even remember if this was the very day he died, or the day before. That’s how quickly these memories get warped.

But you know what? In the end, I managed it. I know unequivocally what my dad’s last utterance was, and what’s more I have a witness. Two of us heard him, distinctly. And this was in the last hour of his life, and we were with him the rest of the way, and he never said another thing. And what he said was totally unexpected, completely lucid, and—in its way, coming from the mouth it did—totally profound. It was also pretty funny. What he said was this:

Wait, hold on. About the only feedback I ever get on this blog is that my posts are too long. And look at this, I’m at like 2,300 words already! So I’m going to just snip this off right here so you can get back to binge-watching House of Thrones or Game of Cards, or tweeting or snapchatting or whatever I dragged you away from. Tune in next week for the thrilling conclusion (I originally typed it “confusion”) of albertnet’s Famous Last Words!

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The Tao of Blade Runner

Introduction

Tao is a Chinese word conveying a complicated array of ideas, such as the journeys the mind makes—these mystical and yet tangible paths, and the process undertaken by the wanderer. The printed character for Tao resembles, to borrow from Woody Allen, “an elephant making love to a men’s glee club.” Of late, applying Tao philosophy to worldly things is more than just an extension of “Zen and the art of [add worldly word or phrase here].” It’s also a way to attach a cool title to a blog post I barely have time to write.

No, I won’t talk about Tao or any philosophy at all here. I don’t have time, and you don’t care anyway. This post is a review, without spoilers, of the new sci-fi flick Blade Runner 2049. Needless to say, it’s impossible to review this sequel without comparing it to Ridley Scott’s original Blade Runner from 1982.

My review

The director, Denis Villeneuve, of whom I was instantly suspicious on the basis of his practically having a girl’s name, acknowledged the pressure of making a movie worthy of its predecessor. “I know that every single fan will walk into the theater with a baseball bat,” he is reported to have said. Sounds like a bit of a drama queen to me.

The fact is, the original movie, though a classic, isn’t perfect. I happen to own it on DVD and watched it with my older daughter as a rite of passage. We both enjoyed it, of course, but I couldn’t help feeling like it hadn’t lived up, in my daughter’s eyes, to all that I’d promised. The original Blade Runner mainly just looks cool. The plot isn’t all that, and the dialogue is just a tiny bit cheesy at times. For example, there’s the scene when Deckard grabs Rachael by the shoulders and utters some macho rough love folderol like, “Say ‘kiss me.’ [Say] ‘I want you.’” My daughter was shocked and I felt myself wincing.

That said, there were also scenes with great dialogue, like Deckard interrogating Leon in the beginning (the bit about “The tortoise lays on its back, its belly baking in the hot sun, beating its legs trying to turn itself over,” etc.). But the scriptwriter didn’t have a perfect ear; for example, Rutger Hauer’s character’s final speech was dancing on the brink of twee. He managed to stick the landing, and because I couldn’t resist (damn it, I’m running out of time!) I did a little research and discovered that Hauer disliked the original speech. According to Wikipedia, he described the proposed final monologue as “opera talk and hi-tech speech with no bearing on the rest of the film,” so he “put a knife in it the night before filming” by trimming it down a fair bit.

My other complaint regarding the original movie is the absurd costumes, particularly Rachael’s ginormous shoulder pads. And the way her giant molded hair suddenly became this kinky Flashdance hairdo is almost laughable when you see it with your jaded 2017 eyes. It’s not easy to escape ‘80s silliness but some movies have.

But still, there was so much to enjoy visually in the original movie, like the dystopian but oddly recognizable, run-down, squalid but electrified rain-pummeled city, its buildings coated with giant electronic billboards, and the cool flying cars slowly rotating as they descend, like helicopters. The atmosphere was so much thicker and deeper and awesomer than just about any sci-fi movie before it.

So does Blade Runner 2049 uphold this standard? Well, yeah, mostly. But that’s not really enough, is it? I mean, since we still have the original available, do we really need a rehash? Much is lost simply because it’s not fresh. Not much new ground is broken aesthetically, and some landscapes in 2049 are too monotonous and blasted to be that interesting. To be honest, several of the scenes are just too dark.

The giant digital billboards are better than ever, but still, a retread is a retread.

Why did Peugeot pay for product placement here? (It’s visible on the dash of K’s car, too.) Does Peugeot even sell cars in the US? And check this out:

Is it possible we’re getting this billboard just to gratify the yen for nostalgia that ageing viewers like me are assumed to have?

Where new ground is broken, quite brilliantly, is with K’s virtual girlfriend, Joi (played by Ana De Armas). We’re introduced to her gradually, like Vladimir Nabokov introduced Lolita. First we get Joi’s voice from another room, so we’re curious, and then we see the projector, on ceiling-mounted tracks, that brings her into the room. She appears suddenly (as abruptly as when you flip on the TV with a remote), and of course it doesn’t hurt that she’s really pretty. But that’s not all: as soon as she appears she undergoes one instant costume change after another, and it’s not clear whether this is her own effort to please her man, or Officer K flipping through the outfits like a bored TV viewer channel-surfing. Their relationship—often warm and tender, but subject to modern realities like Joi freezing suddenly when K gets a visual voice-mail—is far more interesting than what we got in Her. Joi is my favorite character in the movie and her scenes steal the show.

(Should I apologize for blatantly favoring a character who happens to be good looking? Let’s be real. My wife rented Thor, despite having historically shown zero interest in Marvel comics, solely because it stars Chris Hemsworth. She knew the movie would be lame and that I also have zero interest in Marvel comics and their film adaptations, but she rightly assumed I’d roll with it because Natalie Portman also stars. Unfortunately this is one of the dumbest movies ever made and Portman is terrible in it.)

The other 2049 characters are a letdown after Joi. Officer K, the main character, has two things wrong with him. First, we know right off the bat that he’s a replicant. I wouldn’t necessarily say a replicant is automatically less sympathetic than a human (though perhaps this is the case), but K just doesn’t seem to suffer. He gets the crap beat out of him and shrugs it off like the Terminator. Huge misstep by Villeneuve there.

The other problem with K is that he’s played by Ryan Gosling, who is a good enough actor I suppose but totally unconvincing in an action-adventure tough-guy role. He was perfect for La La Land, but his simpering little half-smile destroys the gravitas we expect in a beaten-down blade runner. According to IMBD, he was the only actor considered for the role by Villeneuve, which is all the proof you need that this director doesn’t really know what he’s doing.

Harrison Ford is just fine as Deckard, but he brings to the role the same slightly annoyed, slightly disgusted air that he did to that Star Wars: The Force Awakens movie. Perhaps he’s bothered by the similarity between the two movies: upstart actors and characters new to the franchise head out on a long quest to find him, to give their knockoff movie more cred. I guess I can’t blame Ford for this ennui. In any event, he sets a good example of weariness and gravity for Gosling, which only serves to accentuate the flimsiness of Gosling with his ingratiating little half-smirk.

And then over here you’ve got Niander Wallace, the mastermind overlord (the 2049 equivalent of Dr.Tyrell). This character, as played by Jared Leto, is an annoying, wet-behind-the-ears, hipster-bearded douchebag with no redeeming qualities, and every moment of him on the screen sucks the life out of the movie.

Robin Wright does a good job with the role of K’s boss, Lieutenant Joshi, but she doesn’t have a whole lot to do. Sylvia Hoeks, as the evil replicant curiously named Luv, is pretty and also very badass, but her character is a bit too evil and cruel to be very interesting. What I loved about Rutger Hauer’s character in the original film was, ironically, his humanity. Luv is basically an evil robot type. Kind of a waste of Hoeks’ time and ours.

Speaking of wasting time, please indulge me in what I hope isn’t too lengthy a side note. I mentioned Nabokov above, and there’s a tribute to him in this movie. K’s mental health is evaluated, post-mission, via a strange protocol where he must repeat snippets of text including this passage from Nabokov’s poem-within-a-novel, Pale Fire: 

Cells interlinked within cells interlinked
Within one stem. And dreadfully distinct
Against the dark, a tall white fountain played.

Lest viewers miss the reference, a copy of Pale Fire is clearly visible in K’s apartment. How does this tie in to the film? Answer: it doesn’t. I’ve read Pale Fire at least half a dozen times, and I can’t see any link to the themes of 2049 at all. The poem within Pale Fire concerns an ageing professor ruminating on the hereafter, and the passage quoted is about a vision the man has during a mild heart attack. It has nothing to do with A.I., technology, slavery, androids, or electric sheep. My guess is that Villeneuve is just borrowing an air of intellectual legitimacy from Nabokov. And yet, I find an amusing link that must be unintentional: the bulk of the novel Pale Fire concerns a scholarly parasite who, in the course of 200+ pages of commentary totally dwarfing the poem, tries to co-opt the poet’s work into something of his own. I cannot think of a better metaphor for these movie sequels and prequels that seek to capitalize on the success of earlier works by more original writers and directors.

Okay, onward. Another complaint I have with the movie is the music. The original film had a gorgeous score by Vangelis, which was fundamental to its atmosphere. (I even bought the soundtrack.) But this 2049 movie barely has music … the main instrument is a big drum. We get a bunch of silence and then this big somber BOOM and then some more silence. Sometimes it’s hard to tell if we’re hearing some sound effect or something that’s supposed to be music. I have just discovered, via IMBD, that “Composer Jóhann Jóhannsson was attached to compose the music for the film; however, in August 2017, he dropped out from the project for unknown reasons and composer Hans Zimmer, along with Benjamin Wallfisch, were hired to replace Jóhannsson.” Aha, so the new “music” was tacked on at the last minute, like an afterthought. Well, it shows. Why spend $150 million on a movie and then skimp on the music? What a bonehead move.

Gosh, I’m starting to sound old and crabby and constipated. Look, it’s actually a pretty fun flick. I had a nice time seeing it with my teenage daughter. (Being a source of info and insight into the preceding movie, I suddenly had some cred in the eyes of a teenager, which is a rare thing.) And 2049, whatever opportunities it may have missed, does look really good. Go ahead and see it—don’t wait for DVD or whatever.

Now that that’s over with, let me complain some more. The screenplay for this movie is a mess. It’s based on a sparse 110-page novella, but there’s way too much going on to properly depict even in a rather long movie. A number of scenes must have been thrown out, because there are tons of loose threads. We also get subplots that could be their own movie, and flaws in logic that I can’t forgive. I won’t go into these because I don’t want to give anything away, but I could point to at least three gaping plot holes that any moviegoer who isn’t stoned ought to have a problem with.

All this being said, there is one scene more thrilling and chilling than anything I have seen in recent films. I can recount it without spoiling anything only because it’s so utterly disconnected from anything else in the movie. K, fairly shattered by all the beatings he’s been taking both physically and emotionally, is sound asleep when Joi wakes him up at like 3 a.m. and says, “We gotta change Deckard’s bag.” So they go to his room and Deckard’s ostomy bag has totally blown out, all over his gown, the sheets, it’s everywhere, like a massacre. K and Joi have never changed one of these before and the stench of the military-green quasi-stool is almost enough to make them wretch. (If you don’t think it’s realistic for a replicant and an A.I. projection to be grossed out by this smell, you’ve obviously never encountered it in real life and should consider yourself lucky.) So the whole bag apparatus is soaked in this foul goo, even the wafer that’s stuck to Deckard’s ostomy. The last nurse to change the thing screwed up and left some of the backing on the wafer’s adhesive, which is why it failed. Deckard, bearing considerable discomfort and indignity, is grumpy even by Harrison Ford standards, and K and Joi are obviously winging it, without much brio. K takes a deep breath (big mistake) and sticks down the wafer. He presses it down firmly which makes Deckard groan in pain. Now K’s got to attach the bag, which affixes via this thing kind of like a Ziploc but it’s round, and the bead is really narrow. “Hurry!” Joi cries, because a new flood of green goo is crowning from the ostomy. The ordeal seems to take forever, bringing the movie’s runtime to 164 minutes.

Wait, hold on. I think I’m confused. That whole scene recounted above? That wasn’t actually in this movie at all—why would anybody film that? I’m sleep deprived and confused and not sure where that came from.

It feels like over a month since I watched 2049 and you know what? I’d love to escape into a dark theater and see it again. Maybe this whole review is unfair. At a minimum I guess I should go delete that last paragraph, but I’m just too tired. Maybe I’ll rewrite this someday when I have my normal life back, and maybe then I’ll give Blade Runner 2049 a rave review.

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