A dream investigator discovers that a device for entering other people’s dreams is being misused and it is causing problems in the real world.
What I Liked
I had read The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami, which was a bit of a genre-bender for me. There are some odd twisty elements in it for psychology, bordering on the spiritual side. So I went looking for something along similar lines in a local bookstore. The clerk didn’t have anything in stock, but recommended this book. While some of the elements now show up regularly in sci-fi and fantasy books and movies, the premise was pretty stretchy for the time it was written (1993) and still held up to when I read it (2017 or so).
I loved the premise that the psychiatric institute is helping people through dream therapy, where they actually go into the dream with the person, a form of lucid dreaming where they can interact, and help them interpret their dreams. This isn’t a casual therapeutic practice, it is for those problems that are affecting the day life of the patient, and it is undoubtedly a fairly intimate experience for both doctor and patient, going into the patient’s dream world to figure out what they’re seeing in their dreams and why.
What I Didn’t Like
I only talked to the clerk and read the cover before buying it, so I didn’t do much research. I was definitely not expecting the almost R-rated content in some of the dreams, and it veered at times to being almost porn-like. In addition, the premise of the book that a device is being misused leading to a big giant “virtual” dream battle at the end seemed more suited to anime or cartoon than a prose novel about dream investigation.
The Bottom Line
Fascinating premise, brought low by poor sex and action scenes
I have almost another 250 waiting to be written, but I have been wanting to get going on them again for some time. I keep shifting my approach to sharing online, but at least this last time, I stripped it way down. I don’t quite have the process nailed, but at least I’m going again.
One thing that was a bit funny tonight was that I went to write the book review, and I started thinking about “which book” was worthy of being #200? I don’t really have a good handle on the order in which I’ve read them, so that isn’t the deciding factor. When I did #100, I chose Trace by the late Warren Murphy. Murphy has always been my favourite author, and reading Trace taught me that not all detectives were like Sherlock Holmes or Agatha Christie or even the Three Investigators. It inspired me to consider that maybe someday, I too could write a novel of this type.
For #200, I was tempted to go with another late author, Alison Gordon, of Toronto sports journalism fame. I wonder what she’d write today after seeing the Jays blow a six run lead and exit the wild card game with a loss. Janet Evanovich, Anne Perry, J.A. Jance, even Meg Cabot (more YA) would all be good candidates of the mystery genre. I considered Elizabeth Moon’s The Speed of Dark which is just brilliant.
There are some weird options too…Paprika by Yasutaka Tsutsui is sort of Japanese dream porn, very different from anything else I’ve ever read.
In the end, I went with a memoir. I wish it was a better one, but North To Paradise by Ousman Umar does have some compelling elements in it. It tells a harrowing journey from Ghana to Europe, starting when he was 12 years old. It reads much like some biographies of migrants coming to Canada or the U.S. in the 1800s or early 1900s — except all of his extreme hardship happens in the 2010s, not the 1910s. It’s hard to view that life against the people he encounters in Europe within days of living that life, people whose lives are very different. Alas, the book has little introspection in it, no ability to step outside himself, and some of the truly uncomfortable parts of his emotional journey are either glossed over or dismissed in favour of talking about acquiring food or shelter.
The author was born in Ghana and left his village at the age of 12 to seek a better life in Europe. His extreme journey included smuggling, trafficking, abuse, starvation, and the loss of friends along the way.
What I Liked
The story is told rather matter-of-factly, i.e., “this is what happened to me.” And as such, it is both raw and immediate at times. It is easily accessible and the journey through the desert and the eventual crossing by raft is particularly compelling yet harrowing. It reads in places as if the story is one of the 1800s or early 1900s and people coming from Europe to Canada or the U.S. The migrant who has to just make a go of it by any means possible. Yet then you see references to modern times and are jolted back to reality. This is not 100-year-old history, these are events happening to real people on the ground now.
What I Didn’t Like
I had seen multiple references to the book in international development feeds, mainly because now that he is older, he has started a literacy charity so that he can “give back” and make the journeys of other kids in Africa a little less traumatic. It is a noble sentiment, but frequently I read these “amazing tales” and think “meh”. Many of them are no more compelling than any other person’s journey, and well, I’ve read better. One of the challenges is that the level of detail is strong in some places, but with very little commentary. He glosses over serious issues with sex trafficking, sexual abuse of migrants, and some of the basic issues of how to make it in the rough world. I kept hoping for a bit of wisdom in stepping back to see what some of the experiences meant to his future “self” or personal philosophies, but there is little introspection.
The Bottom Line
Good for the international dilettante, not enough substance for development workers
I know, I know, that doesn’t sound like a very exciting topic. It probably isn’t to anyone but me. I had reorganized my content on my two websites — PolyWogg and ThePolyBlog — about two years ago after a meltdown of the servers, taking advantage of the downtime to fix some scoping and editorial decisions. At the time, I was sort of seeing myself getting more and more engaged on books, writing more reviews, and maybe engaging with more people through my little book club. But about a year ago, I started seeing some of that grouping differently. In part, it was going back to the age-old question of whether my PolyWogg site should ONLY be my formal writing (HR guide, other guides, etc.) or it should include some of my broader fun stuff. There’s no right answer to that, but I was considering trying to make it far more interactive than it was, and that wasn’t a good fit with my general personal site (The Poly Blog).
But then an initially minor incident happened last winter that escalated to having repercussions for my relationships IRL and I pulled back. I did a FB divorce from my wife — I basically unfriended all of our mutual friends, reduced my posse to basically close friends of mine and family for the most part. I’m not even friends with Andrea on FaceBook. And I withdrew from social media extensively, including shutting down my participation in the book club (PolyWogg’s Reading Challenge) that I had created. Not to put too fine a point on it, but I basically didn’t feel like I was in a safe emotional space anymore online. I felt like I was being shit on, and when I protested, I was dismissed. If I disagreed and said why, then I must be man-splaining. If I pushed back, I was a troll. I didn’t have the emotional energy to deal with that toxicity in my life. Instead, I retreated quite extensively, voting with my feet. I miss it, particularly hearing from friends about what they’re reading or broader groups of her friends and family for what they’re doing, spending time on, etc. Heck, even funny memes. But I digress.
The knock-on effect though was that with the PolyWogg Reading Challenge gone from my life, I’m not really doing any engagement on those topics anymore. I joined some other online groups, a few good ones I like to monitor, but I don’t really know anyone, and it doesn’t feel homey in any way. I see some recommendations for possible books, I guess. But I don’t get much out of it. Sooooo, without any real outlet to discuss books actively, I don’t see much point pushing my Book Reviews on the PolyWogg site that will have more interaction on it. Why bother? Instead, my approach is going to be more passive, perhaps less “open” than it was previously, I guess mainly less “public” in orientation. After I exited the book club and revamped my approach to reviews in general (more on music, TV, etc. later), I decided to just post them on my regular personal site (ThePolyBlog).
While I am sad to have lost that broader social interaction in my life, this post isn’t about a pity party, it’s about the process. I had to move my posts from PolyWogg back over to ThePolyBlog. 90% of that was easy to automate. It was a straight export and import, easy as pie. Except then I realized that for some strange reason, it was still pulling the images from the old site. The “links” didn’t update as easily as they should have. I could try and automate that, but I don’t like messing around in the system too much, it’s broken before doing that. Okay, it’s only 199 BRs. I could simply unlink the one image, relink the second, and resave. Easy peasy.
Except…that was necessarily the only issue to consider.
I also don’t really like having my raw review data from when I wrote the posts stored in an Excel file. I have never really liked it, BUT it did help me post my reviews in lots of places by allowing me to write it once and then Excel would reformat it into four other layouts so I could copy and paste to about 11 different sites. Sounds good, right? It always did. But that was when I was trying to at least lay some groundwork to drive engagement for the long-run. Now, I’m only posting to Good Reads and my own site, for the full text, and to my FB page (that anyone can join) and Twitter for links to new posts. So, why do I need to keep the Excel file?
In short, I don’t. I worry a little bit about losing the flatfile database functionality going forward, but I’ve moved the text into OneNote with a page for every author and subpages for each book review. I tried it out, I really liked the ability to have the full text ready whenever I want, all synched to my phone in One Note and resizable at will, on top of having it on my website of course.
But then my OCD side kicked in. Way back to about 1998, I used to have a small list of books that I was missing from my To Be Read pile, about 6 point narrow font, multiple columns, double-sided. It was folded up and travelled with me in my wallet. If I was in a bookstore and looking for something to read, I would pull out my list and see if I could fill some gaps in my collection. But as time went on, and the number of authors I read grew, the list became unwieldy. It grew out of date, I’d try to update part of it here or there, I’d maybe do an update of one author one day but that was as far as I got, leaving the others “open-ended” for completion.
Yet here I was updating my list of books and reviews, with a separate page for each author. Hmm…what if I put the full bibliography on each author’s page. I could list, for example, the 25 books they had written, and then when I reviewed one, I could just put the page link in that spot. An evergreen list of my TBR and REVIEWED books. The holy grail, at some points in my life.
So I did it. It added to my workload, extensively, I confess. I had to research multiple other sites to compile a good list of each author’s works, and when I was done with updating any of the transferred-over book reviews, I could paste the links too. I decided the main page should have it on the website too, not just in my OneNote file. Why not? I might as well, it would save doing it later.
It’s a huge list when finished. On my webpage, at 100% size for desktop, it is over 200 screen pages of content. I’m still playing with some navigation layout issues (separating out the letters of the alphabet a bit more clearly), but it’s basically done. And all of the 199 posts are up and running.
Now, I’m not really “done”, I never really am in a sense. I’m done “phase I” and I’m pretty happy with the progress so far. I’ve even updated my ebook collection so they’re all nicely organized. But I still have literally hundreds of book reviews pending, probably enough to keep me going until next June or so if I do one per day. And there are other authors in my collection list. I only updated the full list for those authors for whom I had at least one book review already or at least some cross-reference perhaps for a series written by multiple authors. Plus I’ll do new authors as I keep reading.
For now, I’m happy with my progress. On to actually reading a huge number of series though.
After some fairly personal posts, how about something a lot lighter? 🙂
I follow the blog of screenwriter Ken Levine (http://kenlevine.blogspot.com/2022/07/weekend-post_0823158561.html) and his recent Weekend Post talked about different actors playing different characters, mainly for the Odd Couple. However, at the end of his post, he asked about people’s favourites playing other characters, one of which was Superman.
It was a fascinating idea. I confess that even though I’m more of a Batman or Spiderman fan, I do love the premise of Superman. So who DO I like best as Superman?
I really had no idea. I’ve been mulling it over in the last week or so, fully expecting I would end up with Christopher Reeve. He was my first Superman, more or less, right? And Smallville never really got to the Superman stage, although Tom Welling was awesome as young Clark. But, of course, the TV versions could never stand up to the movies, right?
As I mulled, I thought back to the various Supermen that I have watched over the years, ignoring voice work for animated series or radio, and I tried to figure out exactly how many Supermen I could remember. I was able to name five, and blanked on the name of the latest. Except there are three others I missed entirely. Plus another that everyone forgot. As I started to review in earnest, I realized there’s actually four dimensions though — Superman, Superboy, Clark, and Lois. You can’t have one without the other three, they go hand-in-hand.
Kirk Alyn
Kirk Alyn played Superman from 1948-1950 in a series of movie serials, back in the heyday of serials that ruled Saturday afternoons. It’s well before my time, and while I recognize him from photos and clips, I never experienced watching them in full. I find it fascinating though that he was the first and lots of fanboys who had followed the comic books weren’t even sure how ANYONE could play Superman. The studio releasing them pitched the serials from the perspective that nobody COULD play Superman, so (nudge, nudge) they got the real one. In a bunch of the credits, he wasn’t even named.
I’ve watched clips, and he did a decent job, but I liked his Clark Kent, mild-mannered / fearful reporter better than his Superman portrayal. I suspect in part because he doesn’t fly in the series — they could not afford the high-end stunt FX to make it work, you could still see the wires, so they did it as animation instead. Meh.
Noel Neill played Lois Lane and she does the “aww, shucks, what we would do without him” really well, but I’m not a fan for her “ace reporter” portrayal, something that shows up again and again for me.
George Reeves
One of the interesting elements in this field of comparison is “who did you see first?”. For the older generation, George Reeves WAS Superman. After all, between 1951-1958, he did two movies and 102 episodes on that new gadget called television. Everyone was watching, everyone saw him fly, not some animated version. Actually HIM.
I confess that while I think he does a credible job, he’s not watchable to me. He looks more like an out-of-shape former high-school football hero, and I think it comes down to the simple reality that if you don’t believe he can do what his character is doing, it’s just hokey. I know, I know, that’s incredibly harsh, and told from the perspective of far better CGI and FX later in cinematic history.
His Clark Kent was decent, a little less wimpy, which was good. But neither his Season 1 Lois Lane (Phyllis Coates) or Season 2 (back to Noel Neill) really stand out for me.
Christopher Reeve
Not surprisingly, while I had seen reruns with George Reeves, my first real “love” of Superman was the 1978 movie with Christopher Reeve. It was the first time I saw a great combo in both the Superman role AND the Clark Kent role. I liked his bumbling persona more than the wimpy side others had done, partly because you saw him deliberately acting that way. Like all of the portrayals, there is a scene where everyone walks away, and he relaxes, where he takes off the mask of Clark Kent and he just “exists” before he turns into Superman. Those moments of duality that didn’t get much screen time in other iterations. But Reeve nails it perfectly. Don’t get me wrong, the movie is relatively terrible. The whole “what colour is my underwear” scene and the romance flying with Lois are “meh”, but his truth/integrity side is borderline perfect when he’s talking normally with Lois.
For me, there are two downsides. First, he can’t do dramatic tension worth a damn. I never feel his anguish about turning back time, I don’t feel his anger when he’s dealing with Zod, etc. The only time I ever felt his real emotion was the scene where he goes back to the diner to beat up the bully. Anytime he steps out of “I’m good Superman” or “I’m bumbling Clark” (or the moments in between), I felt more like I was watching a toddler have a tantrum.
But Superman isn’t watchable without a strong Lois with him, and Margot Kidder comes off more like a bumbling airhead than an ace reporter. I don’t mean that she’s too stupid to notice the guy next to her is Superman, they all have that plot device to work around, I mean she regularly talks like she’s a complete idiot, yet is supposedly this amazing reporter with great insights and understanding of global politics. I don’t MIND her, but I don’t LIKE her.
Gene Hackman is fantastic as Lex Luthor, no surprise for anything Hackman does, but I loved Ned Beatty as Otis. My son and I regularly refer to the line, “Otisville? OTISVILLE????”. But then, it goes downhill. Superman 1 was good, 2 was better with Zod although it really needs an editor, 3 should have been good with Richard Pryor and it just isn’t, and 4 hit everyone over the head about nuclear weapons and detente. I’m willing to keep Superman 2, and ditch the rest.
John Haymes Newton and Gerard Christopher
Wow. This is one of the names I missed, and I’m saying wow not because he was amazing but that I missed it entirely. The show seemed at first like a one-season wonder in 1988/89 on television but I watched a LOT of television back then. Yet I missed it in my list because I have literally NEVER HEARD of it. Superman at university was the premise. Okay, so I missed a season, I guess that can happen.
Nope, it wasn’t just ONE season. It was FOUR seasons. John Newton played Superboy in Season 1, and Gerard Christopher played him for seasons 2-4. What the…?
Okay, so I had to do a deep dive to find some episodes to watch. Why? Cuz I’m a completist, deal with it. Nope, not worth watching. Stacey Hudiak played Lana Lang, and she’s watchable, but nothing to work with. There’s a reason why both male actors have done 1 or 2 other things since, and not much else.
Dean Cain
This is where Superman started to get interesting for me. Dean Cain and Teri Hatcher played Lois and Clark for 87 episodes. While it wasn’t exactly a comedy, it WAS played with a finger aside their nose, often ramping up the campiness. For Cain, his Superman is good albeit a bit boyish, and not quite as much youthful integrity as Reeve showed, but that’s more the cringey love-angst that permeated most episodes. I did like his Clark though, much more “normal guy” and far less of a bumbling fool.
Yet Teri Hatcher kills the show for me. Her breasts may be real and spectacular (according to Seinfeld), but her Lois is not. Just like Margot Kidder, there are a LOT of episodes where she is a bobblehead. She rarely has any depth to what she’s doing that suggests she’s an ace reporter. I know, I know, she’s written that way, but the show WAS called Lois & Clark for a reason. It was pitched about Lois just as much as Clark. And while I didn’t hate the show, it also isn’t my favourite portrayal.
Tom Welling
I watched Smallville from start to finish, and in reruns, and in boxed sets. For me, he is the perfect Superboy. Not Superman, just Clark Kent junior. He has some angsty issues with women, sure, and they occasionally threw Allison Mack some lines about how he had his “super friends” to do a bit of a jokey ending to some episodes. Or they had Arthur Currie / Aquaman show up to save someone, getting to know Clark and finally suggesting they form the JLA — the Junior Lifeguards Association. Ha ha.
But it was the first time I thought they got the balance right on characters. Allison Mack may be a grade A whack-a-doodle now, but as Chloe? She rocked the show. She WAS a great pre-Lois reporter and WatchTower.
And they finally ditched Lana as Clark’s boyhood crush, and brought in Erica Durance as Lois. When she meets Clark? He’s naked in a cornfield. She was the first portrayal of Lois, in my view, where she wasn’t a bimbette. She could keep up with Clark, the Blur and even Oliver Queen. One of my favorite two scenes are when Clark tells her that he’s the Blur (which of course she has already figured out, being an ace reporter and all) AND the final episode where you see her really being full adult Lois.
It’s not all perfect, and I know a lot of people hate the fact that the show took liberties with the original comic-book canon. They had to, this was the first time telling the full story of Clark becoming Superman. And sure, there was campiness in there. But Welling and Durance? They nailed their roles. The only thing I wish was that they had a bit more chemistry together on screen…the characters do, cuz you know they do, but sometimes it was hard to see the spark between them. It was always present with Hatcher and Cain, not so much with Welling and Durance. It’s a quibble, I know.
Brandon Routh
I find it hard to rate BR as Superman. Mostly because for most of the portrayal, I didn’t really see it as Superman. It was more like a Superman-clone. It didn’t FEEL like Superman to me. I liked the dynamic with Kate Bosworth as Lois, and the whole premise of “5 years later” after the Margot Kidder-era headline “I spent the night with Superman”, but well, I kind of agreed with most of the public. Meh. Yet they brought him back for the DC cross-over.
Well, sort of. I mean he was already there as the Atom from DC Legends / Arrow / Flash / Batwoman etc., but for the multiverse cross-over, he was actually Superman in Earth 96. It was cute, I didn’t hate him in the episode, but as Superman generally? Still meh.
Which is a bit odd. I like Kate Bosworth as Lois, and I like Brandon Routh’s work generally for Chuck, the Rookie, all the DC universe shows. I just don’t like him as Superman.
Henry Cavill
So back in 2013, with the reboot of the DC movies, Henry Cavill came in as the new Superman. The Man of Steel by title. But between MoS, Batman v. Superman, and the Justice League, he is a VERY different Superman than we’ve seen previously. Much darker, much scarier. So again, he doesn’t feel like Superman to me. Some will say that is sacrilege, I know. But it feels more like The Boys take on a Superman-like character than Superman. Which is fine to do for Batman, the Dark Knight is awesome, but Superman? I want him to glow and shine, not brood.
Amy Adams as Lois? She’s decent. I don’t love Amy Adams, I’ll admit, but I do find her watchable. But if Cavill isn’t really Superman, is Amy playing Lois or a Lois-like clone?
Tyler Hoechlin
I find it really interesting that quite a few online sites that list roll-ups of who played Superman, almost NONE of them list Tyler. And they’re not simply old posts, some of these were written in 2022 (or at least show as having been updated in 2022). Yet Superman from Superman and Lois doesn’t show up? He played Superman for the first time back in 2016 on an episode of Supergirl. Then repeatedly in other DC shows until the new series started in 2021.
Elizabeth Tulloch plays Lois and, well, I’m on the fence about her. I loved her as Juliet in Grimm, not so much as Eve later in the same show. And in this one, there are repeated scenes where she’s all hurt and angry and dumping on everyone around her, and yet everyone gives her a pass as she’s an ace reporter. What I really want to see is Clark, not Superman, step up and say “enough is enough, you’re acting like a child”. Or her kids. It’s a terrible portrayal of Lois as she bops between this angry self-righteous person who is sometimes right to being super angsty. She’s almost bipolar and it makes it REALLY hard to watch the series.
I like Hoechlin, I like their kids and the secondary characters. It’s telling that I like Lana more than Lois for the series. If Lois was killed off, I’d be okay with that.
I think what REALLY makes it for me though is Hoechlin as a very quiet peaceful Clark. He doesn’t have a job, that’s a bit of a plot issue, but when he’s being a father or husband, there is this very calm, wise, restful presence that shows how he can remain in control as Superman. It’s awesome.
Head-to-head comparisons
So I’m going to do four rankings: Superman, Superboy, Clark and Lois.
As Superman, Kirk Alyn and George Reeve aren’t even in the running. They were great for their time, but their portrayal doesn’t hold up. Christopher Reeve does a great hair curl while looking innocent, but can’t do anger at all. If I could JUST keep Superman 2, maybe. Dean Cain was too campy as Superman, so he’s out. Tom Welling shows up in a few later EPs of the DC TV series as an older Superman but you never get to see him much as a full Superman, and to be honest, I can’t see it. There’s too much Clark. I ditch Brandon Routh as Superman-like, and unfortunately that is the same thing I have to do with Henry Cavill (too dark). But drum roll…Tyler Hoechlin has the best parts of all of them. I’m keeping him as the best Superman, even if not in movies (for movies, I’d have to take Reeve from Superman 2 or the first half of Superman 1).
As Superboy, John Newton and Gerard Christopher were entirely forgettable. Which means Tom Welling wins by default, but he would have won by a landslide anyway. He is a great Superboy aka the Blur.
As Clark, Kirk Alyn and George Reeve are out again. However, while I took Christopher Reeve out of the running as Superman, he does a pretty good mild-mannered Clark who then stops when nobody can see him. Even when he stands up taller, he’s awesome switching between them. And I love his in-between character. John Newton and Gerard Christopher are still forgettable. Dean Cain did a decent job as Clark, more “normal”, so he is a contender. Brandon Routh and Henry Cavill were disappointing as Superman, and so their Clark fails too. But Tyler Hoechlin? He kills as Clark for his inner peace. I would love to keep him, but we never see him DO much as Clark. I’m going to have to give it to Tom Welling as Clark. I wonder if that is because I’ve so much of him in the Smallville series vs. shorter portrayals for the rest.
As Lois, Noel Neill and Phyllis Coates are too much a product of the era. Margot Kidder and Teri Hatcher played Lois as almost a bimbo, so they are out. Erica Durance knocks it out of the park as Lois, easily keeping up with Tom’s Clark. But she never had to play against Superman, that would be a harder nut to crack potentially. I toss out Kate Bosworth and Amy Adams, neither excite me, and I wish I could keep some of Elizabeth Tulloch but not all. So that basically means Erica Durance sweeps.
So let’s see…I want Tom Welling or Tyler Hoechlin as Clark, Tom definitely as Superboy/Blur, growing up to be Tyler Hoechlin’s Superman, and having a full life with Erica Durance as Lois.
I did not see that coming. I think I’ll try Batman next, and then on to Spiderman.
