Areas of Unrest

6 October 1999 - Infinite Series

QOTD: "Fall is my favorite season in Los Angeles, watching the birds change colors and fall from the trees." - David Letterman

Reading: Robert Falcon Scott, Scott's Last Expedition: The Journals

Listening to: Stan Rogers, Northwest Passage

Series - Baseball

Most people who know me think that I rarely curse. Had any of them been in my living room these evening, they would have been shocked, as my commentary on the division series (baseball, specifically the Red Sox vs. the Indians), rivaled any truck driver's vocabulary. Martinez injured, Valentin's error in the sixth, the general collapse in the bottom of the ninth (but, then, I can't remember the last time the Red Sox had any depth in their bullpen) - all of those prompted strings of profanity. What irritated me the most was the TV camera focusing on a sign invoking the curse of the Bambino. Rub it in, why don't you?

At least the Mets won their opener.

Series - Television

I haven't really been excited about the new television season for the most part. With one exception. I've been thoroughly addicted to Buffy the Vampire Slayer from the start, so I had to watch the new season. And I had to watch the series premiere for the spin-off, Angel. I was disappointed in the first half of the Buffy episode, but things picked up once there were vampires for her to deal with. I was somewhat skeptical of the idea for Angel, but I actually enjoyed the episode. I try to make a point of keeping one evening a week entirely uncommitted and it looks like this is as good a reason as any to stay home on Tuesdays. Besides, I knitted half a baby sweater while watching.

Series - Books

Tamar's entry about episodic television got me thinking about series characters in books. The series character is a mainstay of detective fiction. There are some great mystery writers who've resisted (Dick Francis comes to mind, but he gets continuity from the horses) but the detective returning for book after book has been the norm since the days of Arthur Conan Doyle. And, in that case, even the death of the author didn't stop the character; Sherlockiana is almost its own genre.

But the series character is fairly rare in other sorts of fiction. There's some in science fiction, though the setting seems to be reused more than the people there. I can think of only a handful of works of literary fiction with series characters. The most obvious example is the series of Rabbit Angstrom books by John Updike. The only others I could think of offhand were some of Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.'s supporting characters. Note that I am deliberately excluding a single sequel (so Evelyn Waugh doesn't get credit for Decline and Fall and Vile Bodies) and works that started out as intentional trilogies (most of Robertson Davies).

What interests me about this is that Tamar's main point is that the episodic nature of series television provides an opportunity for more character development. If that worked for books, you'd expect that literary fiction would use the serial form more often than mysteries. Instead, it seems that mystery writers often use series characters to avoid character development. Mysteries have gotten longer and longer and do have more emphasis on character than they used to - but very few writers have their characters grow more than superficially.

The most significant exception I could think of was the Martin Beck series by Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo - but that was always planned as a ten book exploration of the changes in Swedish society and how those changes affect the role of police. Which may put the series in the same class as the trilogies I dismissed above, which are really one big book broken up into volumes for convenience.

Reginald Hill may be the other obvious exception. When I read On Beulah Height recently, I was struck by how rare it was to read a 500+ page detective novel that didn't feel padded. I'll have to dig out one or two of the early Dalziel and Pascoe books and see if they've grown as much as I think they have.

This may explain why I find myself reading fewer and fewer mysteries.

Infinite Series

The idea that an infinite series can add up to a finite sum is, in my opinion, one of the most difficult and most beautiful concepts in mathematics. It's too bad that I've forgotten almost everything I once knew about that subject.