One week later

One week of a new American president, and he keeps doing stuff like this. It's strange, feeling like cheering for the US goverment every day I read the news. One keeps waiting for the other shoe to drop, and it might or it might not, but in the meantime, there is this bewildering sensation. A politician. Keeps his campaign promises. Said politician is at the head of the most powerful nation on earth. What?

Incidentally, my mother got Dreams of my Father for Christmas by a friend of hers which meant I've read it, too, and was blown away by the sheer readability, if that's the right word. What I mean: the memoirs of Helmut Kohl are virtually impossible to get through, though they contain the occasional funny highlight which thankfully our papers printed as excerpts. (To wit: Helmut K. and Mrs. Thatcher. They were both conservatives, but he was not a fan, and she apparantly was convinced Germany was just waiting to start WWIII. This led to awkwardness of the retrospectively entertaining kind.) Helmut Schmidt is somewhat more readable - all those years editing Die Zeit paid off - but still not exactly captivating, even when he tells interesting things. (shezan, you'll probably enjoy hearing that he vastly preferred Nixon to Carter, despite being a social democrat. On the other hand, he found Carter and Reagan both equally bewildering as far as religion was concerned. Call it the reaction of a thoroughly secular European leader.) Moving on to American politicians, I found Clinton's memoirs screamed "needed editing", and on the other side of the spectrum, well I tried reading Kissinger. Emphasis on "tried". I gave up and read biographies about him by other people instead.

Now Dreams of my Father isn't exactly a "Portrait of the politician as a young man" type of book (it ends with Obama's first visit to Kenya, years before he became a Senator), more a family history coupled with a finding-one's-identity narrative. But it's well written, it's never less than interesting, and he has the ability to bring the people he writes about to life, whether they are his maternal grandparents, Indonesian step father or his half brother and sister in Kenya. If he ever writes his memoirs about the campaigns and his presidency, I look forward to reading his portraits of everyone from Rahm to Hillary to John McCain to Joe Biden.

And in conclusion: one week, and I still feel like cheering when I open the papers to articles like this one. The rational part in me knows it's bound to end soon, but I'm optimist enough to hope that "soon" is still a bit away.

Drive-by recs

Citizen Kane:

The Hay Scale: a glimpse at young Charlie Kane and Jed Leland, which manages to capture so much about the relationship and about Kane, and does so in an elegant subtle way. It's one of those "you can imagine the actors saying those lines" cases.

Buffy:

Ophelia's Reconstruction, set during the summer between season 5 and 6, this is a Tara point of view. I loved Tara pretty much from the moment she showed up in Hush, and this story is a good demonstration of why. It also does justice to the reality of grief, and offers great glimpses at Xander and Dawn. (The Xander scenes in particular made me wish we'd have gotten more interaction between him and Tara on screen.)

The Three Musketeers:

Some day, I'm going to write my own Dumas meta. Meanwhile, I'm glad when other people do. This post takes on one of my pet peeves* - Milady de Winter (one of my favourite villainesses), the backstory which is supposed to make us feel sorry for Athos but even when I was a teenager made me feel sorry for Milady instead, and the general rendition of her fate.