August 1, 2009
has Shark Week jumped the shark?
The Discovery Channel thought I’d be interested enough in “Shark Week” to open an email from them about it. Apparently I was, but only in a meta way. Twenty-four years after Jaws, do we still find sharks so threatening that they get their own week of TV? Sure, they’re killing machines, but so are ant-eaters. Sure, they very very occasionally kill one of our own species, but so do woodpeckers, and death by woodpecker is way more grisly, not to mention time-consuming.
Besides, it’s Cold Cereal Week on Top Chef, so I’ll be otherwise engaged.
On a more literary note, I just finished Richard Price’s Lush Life. Price is one of my favorites — great at characters, sentences, social worlds, and bruised moralities. Lush Life has the form of a police procedural, although in some ways it’s an anti-procedural. (I say no more, lest I venture into the spoilers realm.) My only disappointment with it is that Price he doesn’t go as deep into some of his characters as others; he often excels as a writer about race, but this novel the main white characters felt more surely drawn than the main black ones. Still, I really enjoyed it.
