Giornata is my Thursday weekly media diary, covering whatever I read, watched, or listened to in the last week. This feature is for paid subscribers, but the first one of the month is always free! Philly’s on strike and I read a romance series that I hated so much that I saw red.
District Council 33 is on strike. This is the union in Philadelphia that includes sanitation workers, so our trash is not being picked up, but it also includes many library workers. If you are a user of the Free Library of Philadelphia, do not cross the picket by going to libraries (some of which administrative staff are forcing non-union staff to open), but also don’t use your Libby account! One of my internet high horses is beef with Libby and the company that runs it, Overdrive. Ebooks and audiobooks themselves are great and I want people to have access to them.
But Overdrive is the digital rights management company and their whole business model is charging public services incredibly high prices for digital books. On top of that, their launder their private corporation image through the app Libby, which used to be called Overdrive, but now as a cute name and a cute mascot. Many people think of Libby as a Netflix or Kindle Unlimited situation, where it is a library of content that can be accessed with a library card.
This is not true. The digital files you have access to on Libby are selected and licensed by your library. The UX of Libby, I think, distances the ebooks you are reading from the library itself, with minimal branding or visual signals that indicate that you are checking a book out from a library. To say you “love” Libby is like saying you “love” the shelves of your public library. I’ve been talking on social media about how using FPL resources through Libby would be crossing the picket line digitally (conversations with FPL staff have confirmed) and dozens of people have told me that they hadn’t thought about the books on Libby being a part of the library’s resources. So Libby’s UX is working as designed!
But if you are in Philadelphia, I strongly suggest you call the mayor’s office or your city council member’s office to express support for the strike and adopting the union’s proposals for fair pay and work place policies. Here’s a graphic with numbers from the Unity Caucus’ Instagram.
Taskmaster, Series 19
My apartment represents perhaps the last two The League loyalists in the world. Similar in premise to It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, but less smart and biting, the show is about a fantasy football league in Chicago. One of the great appeals is that is features Mark Duplass and his wife Katie Aselton. They are not married on the show, but when Katie does something especially funny, Mark frequently has to put his prop beer bottle in front of his mouth to stop from breaking. The same phenomenon also happens on IASIP with Rob and Kaitlin. Men laughing at the wives nailing a physical comedy bit is great stuff!
Jason Mantzoukas features on the show as Nick Kroll’s brother-in-law Rafi. Rafi is a chaos monster, representing the id of the mostly professional class fantasy league participants. They resent his antics, but they’re all such awful people, Rafi’s actions are not that far from their impulses. My sister and I’ve loved Jason ever since and were so excited when he got cast on another of our favorite shows, Taskmaster.
Jason is the first American on the show and his Upper Citizens Brigade improv background as well total gameness means he is the x-factor in one of the best series they’ve ever done. His presence has put into focus the model for many of the studio jokes in the English show, where contestants sit in a line and have back and forths with Greg Davies, the titular Taskmaster. It feels very much like a one-liner contest, a strength of many British comedians with experience on panel shows. When Jason is there, he sets a tone of collaboration in these moments, more akin to an improv sketch, frequently setting people up to spike a heftier joke.
The brilliance of the rest of the cast this season means this works great and doesn’t come across as an American stepping on someone else’s lines, but really is elevating the already delightful nature of the show into something sublime.
An absolute highlight has been Jason’s teamwork with comedian Stevie Martin, on their team Jayvie Martzoukas. They’re not great at most of the tasks they are asked to do together, but have that has a magic combination of earnestly trying and being ironically detached from the stakes of the game. Plus, if you squint, they could be a fan cast for Joni Mitchell and Carey from the song “Carey.”
The Scoundrels of St. James series by Lorraine Heath
Reformed Rakes did a poll on our Patreon for listeners to pick an author for us to do a single book episode on, someone we have not covered before, but is considered a giant in the genre. They picked Lorraine Heath and we picked the book In Bed with the Devil, one of her most popular books based on Goodreads numbers.
I’m not sure if I’ve ever hated a romance novel more. There are plenty of books that I start and don’t finish. This one I blazed through and I hated every second of it and then I read three more books in the series because I suspected more things would happen that I hated and I was correct.
The premise of the series is there are five people who were raised together as orphans on the streets of London by a man named Feagan. When one of them is accused of murder as a teen, the victim’s father, an Earl, comes to see the murderer in Newgate, recognizes the murderer as his own missing grandson and then pays for the education and keeping of his four friends as well. So these five adults have great proximity to the aristocracy, though they were on the street until they were all in their early teens. In the first book, the murderer, Lucien, has now inherited the Earl title, though he remains on the outskirts of Victorian society because of his reputation, stemming both from the precipitating event and his bad attitude at parties.
Astute readers probably caught “Feagan” and “orphans” and thought “hey!” And yes, something is there. Heath is directly referencing Oliver Twist here. She makes major changes to the plot of the Dickens novel though and the changes are what frustrated me so much. In In Bed with the Devil, Lucien is supposed to be Oliver Twist, but his birth origin has changed so that he can inherit an earldom (Oliver is adopted by a friend of his late father and was just the illegitimate result of a love affair, no nobility involved). The Artful Dodger does not get transported to Australia and instead runs a gentleman’s club. The other three main characters are complete inventions by Heath. “Fagin” becomes “Feagan” and he is largely rehabilitated, with the adults understanding that he was trying to do right by them as best he could (no mentions of miserly or abusive behavior).
At worst, I think this is kind of stupid. But what broke my brain is that Oliver Twist, the book by Charles Dickens published serially between 1837-1839 exists in this universe. The heroine in the first book reads it and notices parallels in it with her paramour. This is what kept me reading—I need to know how bizarre and wormhole-y things got. Spoilers for the details below.
In the third book, Surrender to the Devil, things really turned in on themselves. The heroine here is an invented girl orphan who was raised with Feagan’s boys. She is having an affair with a Duke (despite expressing massive distrust of the aristocracy for the first two books). Her main goal in life is to open up a home for children so they don’t have to live with a figure like Feagan, or a more abusive kidsman. One night, Nancy comes to her home with a boy in tow. Yes, Nancy, from Oliver Twist, who is murdered by Bill Sikes in a moment of great self-sacrifice after protecting Oliver.
Nancy wants Frannie to take the boy, her son in. The main purpose of Nancy showing up is to reveal that she, along with Bill Sykes, were responsible for a defining childhood trauma for the heroine. Very little is made of what Nancy is doing to protect her son from Bill, or the ways that she is endangering herself. She is kind of a throwaway character in Heath’s book.
And that’s exactly what Heath does. Despite resurrecting both Nancy and Bill from the timeline of Oliver Twist, Heath has Bill kill Nancy again. Bill will be caught by collaborative efforts of the grown-up orphans and Frannie’s love interest the Duke, though they are all more motivated to protect Frannie than to avenge Nancy.
On one level, this doesn’t make any sense. If the book Oliver Twist exists here, why does nobody comment on Nancy’s death in Heath’s book as connected to Nancy’s death in Oliver Twist? If Charles Dickens is basing his characters off of Feagan’s orphans, why have Nancy die at the hands of Bill in the book? And wouldn’t Heath’s orphans who love Feagan be upset to read the character Fagin who is must closer to a straight antagonist?
I know Heath’s orphans are not upset by Dickens’ portrayal of their lives because near the end of the book, they invite him to an aristocratic party to do a Christmas reading of The Christmas Carol! He arrives and his attitude is basically “what ho! how well all my ruffians have turned out!” The good results for his inspiring orphans is that they have all married into the nobility. Every one of the main characters, except the one who becomes a detective at Scotland Yard, marries a person with a title here. Frannie and Dickens do not speak at about the murder of Nancy at the party.
The way Heath uses this characters and totally removes any presence of a middle class in this world betrays a lack of respect of what is being critiqued in Dickens. He doesn’t really write about the aristocracy, except for A Tale of Two Cities, and there the excesses of the ancien regime are absolutely seen as a proximate cause for the violence of the French Revolution. The petit bourgeoise are often on the receiving end of Dickens’ critical wit, but by having her leads jump from the poorest of the poor to the richest of the rich, Heath elides any interesting commentary about the Victorian middle classes’ culpable behavior related to the poverty in London. Frequently in these books, the emotional arc centers on the upperly mobile member of the couple realizing that a member of the aristocracy can have feelings too.
Beth and I are recording the episode this weekend, so more thoughts are going to be there. I have just needed to tell everyone about how much I hate this series of books.
Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981, dir. Steven Spielberg)
All of Marion’s clothes look like they could be carried by Sézane, but the Sézane versions would be slightly worse.
I’ve seen this in theaters once before. The introducer talked about how in the summer of 1981, the movie just played and played and played and you could go see it over and over again. I think I would have done that! I saw both Emma. (2020) and La Chimera (2023) in theaters four times the week they came out and that’s the most times I’ve seen a movie in theaters that I can remember.1 Neither of those would get the all the summer long treatment like Raiders in 1981, but this comment just made me sad for a cultural phenomenon that has been lost.
I’ve also seen Moonstruck in theaters four times, all repertory showings.
One of Heath’s books from another series, Once More My Darling Rogue includes /several/ defences of trickle down economics (coming out of the mouth of the born-poor-but-adopted-by-aristocrats hero) and it is wild to me that no one ever mentions it in any reviews.