Captain Kirk meets the Doctor

Captain Kirk meets the Doctor, originally uploaded by monikalel42.

A restaging of the scene in the Star Trek novel My Enemy, My Ally by Diane Duane in which Captain Kirk sees a holographic version of the Fourth Doctor (Tom Baker) materialize on the Enterprise with the TARDIS. This is a version of the holodeck seen in other Star Trek series. I had wanted to read this book because I heard about this scene taking place!

The two characters also meet in the story "The Doctor and the Enterprise" by professional author Jean Airey, which can be found online here, at a website of the University of Malta. This is the original fanzine version, with all references to both series intact. A later version took out many references to the characters' names for publication. As Airey explains, the website version is her original text and not later versions! The authorized version on the website is very fun to read and find out what would happen if Star Trek and Doctor Who universes came together!

Happy 50th Anniversary, Paddington Bear!

Happy 50th Anniversary, Paddington Bear!, originally uploaded by monikalel42.

The Paddington Bear books by Michael Bond have been published since 1958. I've enjoyed the novels, and when I first visited England in 1992, I got this toy representation of the character at Paddington Station, where his name comes from. Today Google features Paddington Bear on its front page as part of its Google Doodles series!

Memoirs of the Daleks

The book Dalek I Loved You by Nick Griffiths is a funny and enthralling account of his life as a Doctor Who fan and his career as a writer. Today he works for publications like Radio Times and The Daily Mail. Through his work, he has been able to see the creation of the new series of Doctor Who, and is as much a fan of the latest episodes as the classic series he grew up with. I could relate to his story because I started watching reruns of the classic series in 1997 when the show was off the air, but my favorite Doctor is David Tennant and I like the latest episodes the most. Of course, I don't agree with everything Griffiths opines, since the first story I watched was "Robot" with Tom Baker, and he has more nostalgia for Jon Pertwee's "Spearhead from Space," his initial discovery of the program. Griffiths writes about his memories of the show and how they compare to today's program. As a fan of British television and music, Griffiths also includes lists of his favorite and least favorite things, similar to the Radio Times blogs I've read on the magazine's website.

I've watched and enjoyed the show The Friday Night Project recently, and thought the presenters, Alan Carr and Justin Lee Collins, were entertaining (though Griffiths dislikes Collins' style). I saw the episodes with David Tennant (who hosted twice), John Barroman and some of the one with Billie Piper. How amazing that actors from Doctor Who were hosting the British equivalent of Saturday Night Live. Amy Winehouse chatted about Daleks! Kanye West was a good host as well. I also liked the interview with David Tennant and Catherine Tate on Friday Night with Jonathan Ross, since the host is also a Doctor Who fan. The British media has really supported the new Doctor Who, showing that it really is one of the most popular shows in the UK. I'm enjoying the television and newspaper coverage from Britain, as well as the series of Doctor Who related memoirs like Griffiths', John Barrowman's and Billie Piper's books. It is a tribute to Russell T. Davies' imaginative revitalization of Doctor Who while keeping the spirit of the classic series intact.

The Wizard of Oz

The Wizard of Oz, originally uploaded by monikalel42.

This picture is part of my Bookshelves collection on Flickr.

Reading about Books and Watchmen

One of the books I've read recently, Nick Hornby's The Polysyllabic Spree, is a collection of columns from The Believer magazine based in San Francisco at 826 Valencia. The British writer Hornby is the author of modern classic novels like High Fidelity and the memoir Fever Pitch, about his experiences as a fan of the English football (soccer) team Arsenal. In the articles Hornby writes about the books he's been reading and how his choices relate to his life.

I also read Watchmen, the graphic novel in twelve parts written by Alan Moore, drawn by Dave Gibbons and colored by John Higgins. The comic books were first published in 1986-1987, and portray an alternate version of Earth in 1985 where superheroes fought crime but were mostly forced by the government to retire. Since its publication, Watchmen has been called one of the 100 greatest novels of the 20th century by Time magazine. It certainly lives up to the acclaim, being a complex and fascinating narrative that comments on the legends of comic book superheroes as well as popular culture and relationships between individuals and nations.

I started hearing more about Watchmen because of the film version set for release in 2009. The themes of the book are just as relevant today, with all the conflict around the world. In Watchmen there is the added variable of a powerful being, Dr. Manhattan, who has advanced technology in cooperation with the American government but increased mistrust with Russia. The book begins with narration from the journal of the mysterious masked vigilante Rorschach while police investigate the murder of the Comedian. Watchmen investigates the psychology of the characters and what made them become superheroes, as well as their interactions with everyday people.

San Francisco Library Selection: Then We Came to the End

The San Francisco Public Library has a cool program in which they choose a book for the city to read, and make it more widely accessible to people to check out. Many of the books are contemporary literature, that have been critically acclaimed and on a wide variety of interesting subjects. The May/June 2008 selection is Then We Came to the End by Joshua Ferris, which is a 2007 novel about employees in a Chicago advertising agency and the contrast between the prosperity of the dotcom boom and the economic downturn around 2000. Ferris shows the personal and common experiences that the workers have.

Other stories like Douglas Coupland's novels JPod and The Gum Thief as well as the British and American versions of The Office have also examined this theme of contemporary life in the workplace and its moments of humor and tragedy. Then We Came to the End introduces an ensemble of characters and makes them distinct and interesting all the way through the story, using the first person plural narrative device that creates a sense of community with the reader and the protagonists. In the downturn, the workers find there are fewer contracts and redundancies are unavoidable. There is suspense in who will be made redundant and how they will react to the loss of their job, and also the effect on the workplace as a whole. Ferris creates a literary tone that is also funny and touching, connecting with contemporary life and the younger generation who is used to communicating by email and using computers as a part of everyday life. The novel also engages with how people support and occupy themselves with a job and also how they look ahead to realizing their future dreams.

James Russell Lowell

There was a statue of the poet James Russell Lowell, namesake of the school in San Francisco, made many years ago that was rediscovered recently. It is now on display at the Meyer Library at Lowell where I went to high school, along with some books of his poetry from 1865 I rescued from Mills College library discards, at the dedication ceremony on May 21!




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Anthropological Perspectives

I've been taking anthropology courses at college this year, which covered all of human history from the earliest days of the species to the present day. In cultural anthropology we learned about cross-cultural traits. The classic study Family and Kinship in East London by Michael Young and Peter Willmott I also read was originally published in 1957 and looked at how people lived in the Bethnal Green community, as well as a housing estate in Essex that had been newly built. The authors found that people had many close relationships in the East End, but were disconnected from their family and friends when they moved to the council estate. In the new way of living, they didn't socialize as much with their neighbors. This book confirmed a lot of impressions I got of life in Britain from watching television and movies and reading books set there, as well as two trips in 1993 and 2000.

In comparison with a similar study done of 1970s working class life in Northern California, Worlds of Pain by Lillian Rubin, the communities in California and the council estate in Essex share many traits like trying to get ahead in life and using consumer acquisitions as a marker of status. While Rubin concentrates more on the difficulties of economics and the family, Young and Willmott give a more complete picture of what life was like in East London. The voices of the people interviewed come through and this book may have started the interest by the storytellers on television in chronicling working-class life. These shows have come over to America on PBS with shows like EastEnders and Doctor Who, where the new series in 2005 started out on a housing estate and the show followed the life of Rose Tyler and her family in London as much as the Doctor's time traveling adventures with Rose. These shows increase interest in other cultures, and may lead more people to look into the real stories of people around the world.