Spoiler alert: don't read this if you haven't watched the latest episode of Heroes.
Is it just me or has Heroes gotten really very bad? It's like the writers have no sense of character integrity or character development at all, and everyone is just slaves to a plot that barely makes sense. Which was a problem in season 2 that only seems to have gotten worse.
Problems:
So Syler's "hunger" is a product of his power and not of his psychosis? Doesn't that take away all of his character development, the whole point of his wanting to gather power so he could finally be special? Now he's just someone who would be a nice, normal guy if he wasn't inflicted with a sort of disease instead of a deeply damaged individual who lusts for power and recognition.
After everything Maya has been through, killing all those people, being manipulated by Syler, having him kill her brother, why does she now come off as a normal, stereotypical girl who seems to be around just to react in obvious ways to Mohinder's transformation? You'd think she'd have issues at this point with aggressive, super-powered individuals and not want to just jump in bed with them. You'd think she'd be a lot more freaked out and jumpy.
Mohinder's transformation is a direct and uninteresting retread of The Fly. Why?
So a bunch of scientists working for the Company created three super-powered identical twins and then split them up (why?) with random families and let them grow up without any supervision from the people who created them? Huh?
Why in the world would you have a man-sized vent in a prison cell?
Is it just me or did Molly not age at all in four years?
Wouldn't Adam have at least grown a beard after being in a coffin for several months?
The climatic fight seen in Costa Verde makes no sense at all. Peter and Syler are SO much more powerful than the three they're fighting it's ludicrous that they would even try to go head to head with them. Peter and Syler could have pinned them all up against the wall the moment they showed up. At the least it would have been very easy for Syler to pull his son away.
Also, is EVERYONE related to the Patrelli's now?
So now we have an injection that can give you super powers, as well as a magic desert paste that can make you see the future. These powers really aren't all that special are they?
"Totem" is a native American word, so why is it being used by an African mystic? In fact, the whole journey with your spirit animal thing is very native American and not very African at all. This is lazy writing.
And that's just off the top of my head. It's really getting to the point where I might not bother to watch this stupid show anymore.
So a couple of guys named Stephen McLaughlin and Jim Carpenter have created a new poetry Journal called Issue 1. It's nearly 4000 pages long and is available in PDF form here. It's been creating quite a stir among certain poetry circles lately, mostly because a quick survey of the contributors shows it to be possibly the most significant collection of poets ever assembled. With work ranging from the likes of William Shakespeare, my own 13th Great Grandfather Geof Chaucer, to Contemporary figures like Ron Silliman and Susan Howe, to less widely known but still enormously talented poets like Anny Ballardini, Amy King, and, um, yours truly.
Now, of course, none of us actually wrote any of the pieces attributed to us in the book, but frankly i kind of wish I had written my three contributions. "A Cat of Countries" (page 1248):
A cat of countries
The sympathy of darkness
Singleness
Beardless and eternal
A room of countries
Of progress
Reluctance and fun
Firing beside a cat
Like a considerable sweeping
Feeling love
"Whole as a passage" (page 2646):
Whole as a passage
Into a swept whisper a fascinating trader
arrived
The passages mumbled
Those were whole
A rapid rib, cheap rib,
useful rib of an impossible thieving
Was he impenetrable?
Let her stare
Should he have been silent?
From his difficult arm he hungered for
one, having, from his throat demoralization
waiting
That was the creek?s wilderness
Sorrow, you were
not there, making like a head
Fascinating and enthralling
He would sooner
be different,
Big and little
?I save brass,? he whispered
He was lived by a
mutter
He was thinking of the ghastly lives
of bailiffs, knocking silently beside reckless conceptions
Now the thievings filled in the breeze
And my favorite, and the one that sounds the most like me, "Changing news like intelligence" (page 3573):
Changing News Like Intelligence
To burn descending on an art
A person
His anodyne news
Beginning beside a tree
More minor than a beggar
Now, of course there are some people who think this is lame. Others who take issue, like Silliman who made some vague mention of legal action in his blog about it.
To such people, I say chill out. It's a nice piece of something. There's no damage to your reputation taking place here. Clearly the list of authors was gleaned in someway from Buffalo poetics/the kinds of magazines folks like us get printed in. And frankly, taking Rita Dove at one end, and myself at the other, of a spectrum of fame, none of us are all that well known to the point that anybody outside our little poetry world will care about this one way or another. Take it as a compliment and relax. This thing is the best piece of flarf I've ever come across and frankly, like Anny Ballardini said on the Buffalo list today, I wish I'd had the idea.
