The Sort of Thing Small Blogs Rave About

Recently I heard The Wire described as the sort of thing small blogs rave about. I don't know whether the phrase was original or not, but it was pretty much the neatest description of the series I'd heard since I heard of it last year in Media Studies (not, perhaps tellingly, on a small blog). Although its underlying message of an inherently flawed American dream isn't entirely unique, even within the domain of cop shows, The Wire combines a greasy charm - Detective Jimmy McNulty, famous for his whoring and drinking - with a bleak portrait of the Baltimore ghetto. When you combine this with gritty and atavistic (thanks, Mr. Alexander) realism, you get Clever American Television which is raved about on small blogs.

Although this blog is even smaller than the smallest of those, and not even in this infantile stage guaranteed consistent updates, I'll try and keep my raving short. Basically, a summary would be that I'm pleased to be studying this particular television series in English this year. Which, happily, brings my preamble to a close.

The words 'great' and 'literature' came up in class today (well, actually, 'greatest text', but there are bones to pick out of that). We were told to talk about the greatest text we'd ever read, or, in the cases of video games and films (or HBO dramas), played or watched. I wrote about my favourite, which was the one that came to mind soonest: Slaughterhouse 5. Wikipedia explains that Slaughterhouse 5 or The Children's Crusade: A Duty-Dance with Death (1969) is an anti-war science fiction novel by Kurt Vonnegut about World War II experiences and journeys through time of a soldier called Billy Pilgrim. It also mentions that reviews of Slaughterhouse-Five have been mixed since the 31 March 1969 review in New York Times newspaper that glowingly concedes: "you'll either love it, or push it back in the science-fiction corner".

Slaughterhouse 5 is probably not as significant a postmodern work as Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow, and it both weighs less and deals with issues of less Biblical significance than either Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian, Dante Aligheri's Inferno, or even the Bible. Its prose is, well, prosaic (The gun made a ripping sound like the opening of the zipper on the fly of God Almighty), but too silly to be anything like Hemingway, who was prosaic and gritty, or Bukowski, who was a gruff alcoholic left alone too long to brood. What Slaughterhouse 5 has that these books don't isn't much, but its delightful silliness and vastly different atmosphere make the tragedy in it much simpler and much more human. Vonnegut sketched it out by filling in the space around it, and by doing that made room for a lot of warmth.