Of Larks and Pathmarks

Monday, 13 July 1998

I finished Robert Reed's An Exaltation of Larks (Tor, 1995) today on the subway ride home. The SF reader in me found it a bit frustrating, because the plot hinges around a super-powerful entity trying to stop a super-powerful criminal, and with no real idea of the limits on the characters' power I had no real idea of what options were excluded from the story, so the resolution had a somewhat arbitrary feel to it. On the plus side, the characters seemed like real people, the descriptions were evocative, and the basic story conceit was clever and imaginative. On the whole, I enjoyed it, and will look for more of Reed's work.

Another plus: It was short, something like 60-70 thousand words. I mean that as sincere praise; all too many SF and fantasy novels nowadays are padded way beyond their natural length. I like seeing the work of an author who knows when to stop writing.

On the way home, I had just about my most frustrating shopping experience of the past several years. It was at the Pathmark I mentioned a bit over a year ago. First, I had a hell of a time just getting in. Outside the door, I grabbed a shopping cart that wasn't being used, and tried to manuever my way in through the steady stream of people coming out through the clearly marked entrance. Once inside, I noticed that my cart was broken, and switched it for another one, which also turned out to be broken.

I decided to just keep going with the second cart, and spent about twenty mintues gathering up foodstuffs, stopping every three or four steps to keep from ramming my cart into a running child, or another cart that had been left in the middle of an aisle, or some other obstacle.

Finally, I made it to the shortest of the express lines, only to be told that it was closed. That was also the point at which I realized that it didn't matter -- the sign above the cashier said that the store accepted Visa, MasterCard, and Discovery, while I had been hoping to pay with my American Express card. I spent a few minutes putting the most perishable of the items back in refrigeration, just because I don't like to see perfectly good food go to waste, but got tired of trying to navigate those cluttered aisles and finally just left the cart with a whole roast chicken still sitting in it. If Pathmark isn't going to go to the effort of allowing me to shop with my preferred form of payment, I don't see why I should go to the effort of keeping their food from rotting. And it'll probably be a while before I'm back there; MetFood is closer, and takes American Express.

The Fifth Element turned out to be better than I'd thought it would be. It's fast-moving, and a lot of fun to watch, and even clever in places. Unfortunately, it's also very, very stupid in other places, especially the big shoot-'em-up climax, which suffers from the traditional action formula under which the protagonist, just by virtue of being the hero, can dodge bullets, ignore explosions, and hit whatever he wants without taking time to aim, while the villains seem unable to so much as wound anything but scenery.