In Which We Made A List Of Gift Ideas For You And Your Loved Ones

Christmas Reading

by DICK CHENEY

It's always nice to cuddle up in an armchair that encircles me completely like a lover, holding in my clunky hands an e-reader stained with the juices of avocados, imported grapes and that tetanus shot. In those moments time itself stands still, and I am brought back to a familiar yet unfamiliar moment — that of being in the womb.

Real books made of paper hold little interest for me now, but I understand that for others they remain a novelty. Instead of looking at the binded paper as simply a conduit for information, I now purely view it as a material good, like a dinner bell, a caftan, or a PlayStation 4. I was not paid for any of the recommendations I make here, or even slightly encouraged. If you're going to accept amoral blings and blangs for your tactfulness, make sure it's from an oil company.

Sometimes when I'm in the only hipster coffee shop in Wyoming, trolling for people to hand out "flyers" for my "lost dog" as a means of getting their fingerprints, I see what people are actually reading. Everytime I see the name Jonathan Franzen on a spine I want to cry out, but instead I just bing Michael Chabon divorce and hope today will be different.

As a status symbol, a physical book is better than a crown I suppose. People still like to receive them, it would seem, so I have written down some options for your loved ones. But if you do find a woman or feminine-looking man that you really want to impress, don't give her a book, give her a Sea-Doo watercraft. She'll leap on you like your blouse is on fire.

Compared to Ugly Duckling Presse, every other independent press is gross and weird. Ugly Duckling's Brooklyn location publishes fine poetry and prose in the loveliest imaginable editions, and unlike the kickstarter you funded for a book featuring all of Chip Kidd's sketches of penises, the end product is sure to find your door. Moreover, your lady friend to be will be reminded of you all year, and not just of vague texts like, "Ur my orange peel," none of that, just exquisite poetry to shake the rafters. The only man who did not have to continually remind a woman of his greatness was David Ben-Gurion. A base membership is only $60.

Emily Books is well on its way to becoming the premiere book-of-the-month club for women in America. (I think once or twice they chose a book by a man, but it was not very well received.) The idea for the club, born in Emily Gould's kitchen or finished basement, consisted of the possibility that women could be taught to think less of their partners by specific movements in literature. Once you see Keith Gessen's chest hair up close though, it's very hard to think badly of men. But seriously, these young women have exquisite taste in books, and when I see Lynne curled up with the latest Scott Turow I kind of wince. Turning me onto the magnificent writing of Rebecca Brown was merely their opening act. If only Park Slope had been around when I was looking for a wife. Joining Emily Books is so cheap too you guys, I mean Emily was pretty nice to you, why can't you support her thing?

The club's December pick was its most inspired so far. Elena Ferrante's The Days of Abandonment mixes the two intellectual concepts I find most attractive in other people — a contagious sadness and the possibility of humor in any moment.

But yes, actual books, not just pathetic jokes about people who are actually interested in them. The New York Review of Books began their own subscription club fairly recently, although none of their fall titles really rustled my jimmies. Spring 2014 looks a lot more promising, as the label brings out Hillel Halkin's exciting translation of Eli Amir's The Dove Flyer, which you can find elsewhere if you're impatient. Halkin is not only the best translator of Hebrew alive, he may be the finest in any language besides Lydia Davis. (Her Proust remains the iconic gift for a gay man in love.) The new season also promises On Being Blue by William Gass and an erotic collection of the poems of A.K. Ramanujan.

New Directions is still an exciting and eclectic publisher, even if they seem to be focused on the discursiveness of the past rather than the present. This year they offer two volumes completely suitable for the other person in your life. Imagine how happy her face will be when instead of displaying that engagement ring, you give her ND's marvelous release of the Emily Dickinson envelope poems, The Gorgeous Nothings, with an essay by the poet Susan Howe. I think it might be sold out, so go with God/Margaret Atwood and consider Takashi Hiraide's feline novel The Guest Cat and the long-awaited collected poems of Denise Levertov. They make magical gifts as well.

Have you ever felt that 90 percent of the people in the world were named Molly or Emily? You're not alone.

Ever since I wrote my now legendary teardown of Fox's fetid show Almost Human, publishing companies have been sending me the latest science fiction, although nothing by Peter Hamilton, since I don't have anything close to that amount of time on my hands. Major standouts include the beautifully crafted custom editions provided by the best niche press in publishing, William Schafer's Subterranean Press. If I had an unlimited amount of money I would buy all of the Michigan press' lettered and limited editions (you can usually request your LE number, I routinely pick 69 for giggles). Especially popular has been a lively and bright new version of The Shining. Gift editions are still available according to the publisher, who I badger on gchat constantly by reiterating how much The Dark Tower sucks.

A new anthology by George R.R. Martin and the equally rotund Gardner Dozois entitled Dangerous Women feels a bit hastily slapped together, as if the best writers in the field were busy trying to put more sex in their novels and this is what was left. Still, at $20 this makes a nice coffee table book for your new girlfriend, or if you're feeling generous, her earthy daughter. Try not to laugh when the top google search result for 'dangerous women' is now a book edited by two dangerously obese men.

A better choice would be Gene Wolfe's new Kafka paean The Land Across, which features feuding magicians, a mediocre dictatorship, treasure hunting and a fairly long prison stay squeezed in there as well. Wolfe's recent novels are almost all dialogue, making them perfect for any travel that doesn't have an ending destination in Eastern Europe. After reading about the land, you will not want to go there anytime soon.

The Land Across was almost the best book I read from this year (it came out over Thanksgiving) but it was not the best book I read from this year. (Well, Morrissey's autobiography was stellar too, did you perchance know he was sad?)

That honor goes to Eleanor Catton's The Luminaries, winner of the Man Booker Prize. One time I promised Lynne I would spend the entire day speaking in back cover plaudits. Lynne was "a masterpiece, a woman that any thinking person should read and enjoy," my mailman was "a key treatise...Genuinely thrilling," and my younger daughter was "Gripping; Got me in her clutches and would not let go." For some reason I feel the exact same way about anything that takes place in New Zealand or involves the name Eleanor.

Dick Cheney is the senior contributor to This Recording. He is a writer living in an undisclosed hipster coffee shop. You can find an archive of his writing in these pages here. He last wrote in these pages about evolving at an uncontrollable pace.

For further recommendations in this field, experience:

100 greatest novels

100 greatest sff novels

our novels, ourselves

"Beautiful Lie" - Sophie Madeleine (mp3)

"Let's Never Love" - Sophie Madeleine (mp3)

The new album from Sophie Madeleine is entitled Silent Cynic, and it was released on November 1st.

In Which We Give Everything We Have To Our Robotic Partner

don't believe his lies

Urbane Man

by DICK CHENEY

"Sometimes newer technology isn't better," whines a robot of color shortly before a bunch of cops leap into battle without bulletproof vests. The irony is not only lost on his human partner, detective John Kennex (Karl Urban), there is in fact no irony at all in Fox's new hour long drama Almost Human. It is an impressive achievement considering any depiction of the future, no matter how unimaginative, usually manages a sense of humor about itself. Making a show that pretends to be about tech when it really concerns an absurd fear of it is a dirty trick.

Actually, newer technology is always better. I would say that there is no such thing as a bad robot, but that would only be evidence that this shitbag of a television program exists purely as a lame pun on the name of J.J. Abrams' production company. In the near-future world of Almost Human, the only thing really different is that the architecture is a lot worse, and glass a lot more plentiful. A police station composed entirely of glass might be the dumbest thing I have ever encountered.

guys in the future our tablets will be, get this, HORIZONTALIt is difficult to think of anybody as bad at anything as J.J. Abrams is at everything. Ideally he will be making terrible Star Wars films for decades on end so we don't have to actually see him try to be creative. (Super 8 was the most pathetically patronizing piece of art produced since Saving Private Ryan.) Abrams' "ideas" are only new or interesting to people whose last novel was To Kill A Mockingbird in 8th grade. Which reminds me, that book is racist, but not nearly as racist as Almost Human.

never taking the hashtag off the screen is an oblique commentary about the dangers of technology I suppose, it sucks

The android (Michael Ealy) is actually not really a robot at all. He is surrounded by "newer" versions of himself that, he explains in a glossing over that would make our president proud, cannot draw inferences. Since he is capable of such complex determinations, he may not be human, but he is certainly sentient, and killing him would be murder in any decent society.

Such moral conundrums are the least of your concerns once you realize the android is the only actor with any talent on the entire show.

she left him after she saw his performance in "doom" on cinemax one night
There appears to be no racism of any kind in 2048, except of course discrimination against androids. Gifted with one technology — but no others — the people of Almost Human appear kinda, somewhat futuristic. Yet all their other methods are not only not advanced, but completely retrograde. There was a Windows commercial during Almost Human that showed off more computing power than in the entire police station on this show.

At one point someone actually says of a police officer exposed to a deadly pathogen, "It's like he has a hundred different diseases at once!" Do you dimwits have any fucking idea how stupid that is?

so in the first episode the villains have a trick that can turn off all the robots. Think about this. OK, stop before your brain breaks.Perhaps, you are stupidly protesting, Almost Human is fun in a silly kind of way. Unfortunately, as I said, there are no jokes in it. Besides that, Karl Urban's detective, meant to be a grizzled compendium of synthetic replacements and anger management issues, enunciates all his lines in a throaty growl that is too difficult to decipher quickly enough to masturbate to its bass. Nor am I convinced that this will be the show to finally break the staid television convention of never showing a robot's penis.

um hey lili ask the tiny little napoleon you sold your soul to if he would give it back after this is canceled

Urban's police captain is portrayed by Lili Taylor. She is three feet shorter than her underling and has to tilt her neck like a door hinge to meet his eyes. The poor woman's dignity seems to ooze into a puddle at her feet. I hope she fed and clothed her memwah-writing husband Nick Flynn with the money J.J. paid her, because otherwise there is little justification for this mashup.

the future: just like now but with considerably worse architecture

Is Almost Human racist? Certainly. Imagining that racial differences would vanish completely in thirty years time is not science fiction, it is fantasy. Convincing yourself these ancient divisions would be replaced by a suspicion of androids is even less likely. Comparing racism to fear of technology on any level is an insult to both concepts.

As bad as Almost Human is, at least it does not attempt to make you care about the protagonist by showing his tender father-daughter relationship with a little girl. J.J. Abrams is simply unimaginative; Harper Lee is an asshole.

"how did you lose your eye, sir?" "I poked it out while watching Revolution obvs"

Getting cheap sympathy for some privileged white dude by having him care about a child is the most loathsome trick in narrative. Well, killing Bambi's mother was pretty bad, but Harper Lee was worse.

I really hope he didn't burn down that cute yogurt shop

One of the only positive things about J.J. Abrams is that you can instantly realize how awful his work is. You don't have to wait until my blog post fifty years after the fact, as with To Kill A Mockingbird. My wife Lynne and I were actually brainstorming a list of things that are terrible only in retrospect. I will share the part of the list that does not concern itself with late 1970s pornographic films:

American Beauty
King Lear (we get it, you were worried about your daughters or something)
Cheers
Brooke Shields
Salvador Dali's paintings
The Secret of NIMH (spoiler, the mice were dead all along)
M. Butterfly
Xbox One/Johnny Carson
Heart of Darkness (this man could not write like, at all, and the whole story makes no sense, I mean, okay, you were mad you had to kill some people, grow up)
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius

Lynne and I can't decide what to call the honor of appearing on this list. We are split between the Margaret Mead Prize For Being Misguided or the Sam Mendes' Marriage Lifetime Achievement award.

ya part of ah famlee now govnah
Time to eat crow: even I have to admit that the writing on The Walking Dead has improved noticeably. By eliminating the program's tedious characters and keeping the ones still capable of meaningful change or development, The Walking Dead feels tighter and less same-y. Last night's episode began to detail what happened to the governor since he massacred his own people, and despite my dead-on balls accurate critique of its manipulative aspects, I watched in rapt attention.

Crucial to the show's improvement has been a kind of warped eroticism. Watching a divorced mother of one blow on a laceration the governor obtained on his forehead was quite stimulating. Later, in the back of a food truck, the relationship was consummated entirely in silence as the Lord intended. You have no idea how relieved I am to be able to watch sex on television without hearing Lizzy Caplan's voice resonating through the entire scene.

the brilliance of this moment can never be dissipated in retrospect

A lot of shows would be worlds better if you killed off major characters, especially if they are portrayed by Karl Urban. Maybe I would be able to watch Mad Men again if Ted Chaough was found in an unmarked grave, for example. It's unfortunate that there is really no way to kill off Sean Hayes from his own show, although maybe his daughter will stick a knife in his neck for lying to her.

The Walking Dead has pressed the same masculine sympathy button a number of times. The men in this world are all mottled, unshaved and derelict; the woman alone have an earthly effervescence that was returned to them after the fall. I don't believe this is supposed to be because they are any better or worse at surviving their lives. The reason for this disjunction lies not in how men are intrinsically, but in how they viewed themselves before the fall. Becoming powerless is not quite as difficult if you never had much of the drug to begin with. Think of how many gay slurs Alec Baldwin would use if he wasn't rich as the day is long.

Dick Cheney is the senior contributor to This Recording. He last wrote in these pages about Super Fun Night and Mom. You can find an archive of his writing on This Recording here.

"I Couldn't Say It To Your Face" - Ben Sollee (mp3)

"The Last Pale Light In The West" - Ben Nichols (mp3)

In Which We Retreat From Several Spurious Accusations

Only A Very Pale White Man

by DICK CHENEY

Guys, Dracula was just a guy. Think about this, I mean, or don't. Dracula was a man just like you were a woman, is what Maureen Dowd says in the mirror on Wednesday mornings. (Every other morning of the week she works out.) NBC's Dracula takes this concept to an illogical extreme.

Affecting a neutral sort of American accent in London society, Dracula (Jonathan Rhys Meyers) was just such a man, and he was not as evil as you had perhaps imagined? I will never — I repeat never — shit on a hagiography, but we are talking about the King of Death here. Or at least I think that is correct; the decade I read Anne Rice I was mostly on hallucinogenic drugs.

um Dracula people are watching
Rhys Meyers seems a bit cowed or disappointed by the role, drawing his voice into a low hush uttered quickly and concordantly. He has a black manservant named Renfield (Nonso Anozie) who knows of his affliction, and the two have reached some kind of understanding along the lines you might see in a lion and an oversized gazelle.

Resurrected by Dr. Van Helsing, Dracula is apparently a revenge-seeking individual along the lines of a scorned widow. He doesn't enjoy anything, not even murder. He thinks he's a hero: he does not know he is Dracula. What a disappointment.

this is your wifi password sir, here you go

It really doesn't make sense for the Dublin-born Rhys Meyers to do an American accent. I guess they felt the show would otherwise be too British for American television. I have to admit it might be. I mean, I watch Downton Abbey mostly to see what's coming to that murderer Bates, but my wife no longer comprehends a single word Lady Mary says, and she says my replacement Sybil jokes have run their course. You can't properly mock what's already a joke.

Watching Dracula was kind of time-consuming, although I am a categorical supporter of plus-size individuals on television. For example, on Usenet I defended Kirstie Alley long after it was remotely rational to do so. With this in mind, ABC's Super Fun Night reminds me of a lightly pleasant dream.

this is a realistic looking workplace
Rebel Wilson plays a young woman my daughter's age who works at a law firm. It turns out — this was the plot twist copied shamelessly from I believe Dallas — that the lawyers just crack jokes all day and spend their evenings consorting with her ugly duckling type men. I have never seen a woman so obviously appealing to men portrayed as unlikeable since Tina Fey.

Incidentally, the supposedly tongue-in-cheek way that Mindy Kaling talks self-deprecatingly about her body made my wife cry. I wish I knew how she felt.

stop wearing my pajamas Rebel

In reality, there is no such thing as self-deprecation, only self-hatred. Ms. Wilson's appeal echoes beyond that through an inner vivacity the world has not yet been able to rip from her. Her charm and comedy consists of a certain misplaced faith in a mix of the wrong and right things.

Taste is arbitrary, and repeating that maxim to myself is the only way I can read Talking Points Memo. You have to know the enemy, or better, know yourself. Wilson's character — Kimmie Boubier — has no clue of either, so Super Fun Night feels as dazzlingly unfinished as she does.

"Honey, were you feeling typecast in roles where you portray a former Playboy bunny? Because that happened to me."
Lynne prefers smaller quarry. Anna Faris stars in Mom with Allison Janney, who plays her mother. Faris' waitress character has a daughter and son of her own. No word on whether she signed up for health care, outside of the grotesque rants presented after each episode by the show's ancient creator Chuck Lorre.

Faris' lips form a strange and wacky inculcation. Janney looks fantastic for her age, the lowest compliment you can give a woman, and doesn't convincingly channel a mothering instinct. It's obvious she cares for her daughter, but in such a counterproductive way that I do not find it so comedic.

Chuck Lorre allowed a person of color on one of his television shows, fantastic
Both women are recovering alcoholics. For two women who frequently describe their wild pasts, the two are remarkably prude in sexual matters, to be disgusted by such simple notions as they are willing to discuss openly. It's a vagina, not a dark, undiscoverable place that can't be named aloud.

Faris' daughter Violet (Sadie Calvano) becomes pregnant herself and chooses not to abort the child. Very little is said about her decision, and she quickly separates her acquaintance with the baby's father and his religious family.

French Stewart deserved better, actually no he didn't nevermind

Faris begins intercourse with her married boss (Nate Corddy), a development so unlikely the two never touch onscreen except once. She breaks up with him partly for his rigidity and partly out of boredom. She tells a city engineer (Justin Long) that the stop sign he designed is very interesting, but she does not wholly believe it, and gives up on him too. Something about Faris makes all of this a bit more human than I have just described.

That show where Karl Urban is pals with a black robot looks like utter shit.

Dick Cheney is the senior contributor to This Recording. He is a writer living in an undisclosed location and the former vice president of the United States of America. You can find an archive of his writing on This Recording here. He last wrote in these pages about the end of Breaking Bad.

"our robots must have more wrinkles! begin!"

"Before We Run" - Yo La Tengo (mp3)

"I Saw The Light" - Yo La Tengo (mp3)

The latest album from Yo La Tengo is entitled Fade.