Banned Books at DSU

Did you know that in 1973 the school system of Drake burned Slaughterhouse Five as obscene? Or that just a few years ago, in 2009, the Beulah school board banned Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil?

Rita Ennen, director of library services at Stoxen Library, and I decided to take a stand against such censorship by sponsoring a Celebration of Banned Books on the campus of Dickinson State University. This celebration, inspired by the American Library Association’s Banned Books Week, included six events over a two-week period in mid-September.

The celebration began on Sept. 17 with a panel discussion about the First Amendment and freedom of speech. The panel, moderated by DSU political science professor Steven Doherty, featured Jack McDonald, an attorney in Bismarck; Christine Kujawa, chair of the Intellectual Freedom committee of the North Dakota Library Association; and Kathy Cline, librarian from Beulah public schools.

In addition to a general discussion about the importance of the First Amendment in a free society, the panel discussed specific incidents in which books have been challenged in North Dakota, including the decision to remove Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil from the Beulah School Library following complaints from parents.

Suzanne Russ, an associate professor of psychology, said that she found the panel very informative, adding that it “offered a fascinating discussion and first-hand account of the powerful stance librarians quietly assume in defense of our rights to choose our own reading materials.”

The second week of Banned Books featured five events: three read outs, in which DSU faculty, staff, and students read from banned books, and two book discussions. The first book discussion, hosted by DSU assistant professors Kathy Hanna and Renae Ekstrand, covered The Call of the Wild and a selection of children’s books, while the second, hosted by Ms. Ennen, covered Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil.

Ms. Ekstrand said that the Celebration of Banned Books was a valuable experience, for it demonstrated “that learning occurs outside the classroom as well as within on our campus.” She added, “It is always exciting to see community members, students, and faculty come together in the audience as well.”

To promote the celebration, Stoxen Library sponsored a contest for students to design the poster for the event. Out of the 50 entries, judges selected a first place (won by Kira Haag) and the library’s patrons voted for a people’s choice (won by Delano Lilly).

Ms. Ennen said that she was very pleased at how well the campus received the celebration. “The student poster contest and display were an especially enjoyable added dimension,” she said. “It was also gratifying to have participation from members of the local community for most of the events.”

The DSU community embraced the Celebration of Banned Books with such enthusiasm that Ms. Ennen and I plan to make it an annual event.

Mark Twain in Salon

Last week, the on-line magazine Salon reprinted a couple of pieces about Mark Twain. The first looks at how newspaperman Samuel Clemens made himself into a “brand” by borrowing the pseudonym “Mark Twain” from a humorous essay in Vanity Fair while the second is an excerpt about Christianity from volume II of Twain’s Autobiography, which will be published on Oct. 5.

I’m not wholly convinced by the explanation that he took his pen name from Vanity Fair, although the truth will likely never be known. I discussed the debate about the source of his name in the first of my two books about Twain. Check out pages 71-72.

Likable characters?

Should writers create "likable characters" for their readers? Two novelists, Mohsin Hamid and Zoe Heller, debate this question. Hamid reframes the question, asking:

Perhaps, in the widespread longing for likable characters, there is this: a desire, through fiction, for contact with what we’ve armored ourselves against in the rest of our lives, a desire to be reminded that it’s possible to open our eyes, to see, to recognize our solitude — and at the same time to not be entirely alone.

Heller suggests, however, that the question is an important one that needs to be answered. Although she's not wholly comfortable with the idea that readers need to "like" fictional characters, she concedes that readers do need to care about them:

Other fictional characters may invite or accommodate more complex responses, but most authors aim to engender some species of readerly empathy for their protagonists. It’s not necessary to “like” Hamlet, but if we’re so repelled by his treatment of that sweet girl, Ophelia, that we withdraw all sympathetic interest in his dilemmas, then the play is unlikely to mean much to us.

Tenth of December

I first encountered the stories of George Saunders stories when I read “The 400-pound CEO” in Harper’s Magazine in 1993. Saunders soon published other stories, which I read avidly, and then, in 1997, published his first collection of stories, CivilWarLand in Bad Decline. Not only did I immediately buy the book, I also did something very rare for me: After reading it, I sent him my copy with a fan letter. Saunders returned the book with a nice inscription and added a warm letter of thanks.

I’ve kept up with his career since then, reading his stories (mainly in The New Yorker) and buying his books. His latest is Tenth of December, which is another collection of odd tales of life—either contemporary or in the near future—in suburban America. As usual, Saunders’ eye is keen, whether he is describing the inner fantasies of people who have failed at life or the interactions between people who can barely stand each other’s company. And, also as usual, many of these stories are wickedly funny.

Some of the stories, such as "Puppy," however, are unbelievably sad. Told from two points of view—an upper-class mother who takes her children to look at the puppy offered by sale by a lower-class mother of a mentally handicapped child—this story suggests that any communication between people of different social status isn't possible, which leads to a puppy not being adopted by a family that could have cared properly for it. Instead of the upper-class children having a puppy to make them happy and the lower-class family having $20 to help them eat, no one has anything. I'm not sure if this is pessimism or realism, but it's damn bleak.

Also bleak is "The Semplica Girl Diaries," written in the form of a journal, which tells the story of a father trying to please his teenaged daughter, who has befriended a rich girl, by giving her a birthday party for the ages. Predictably, things go wrong (even after the father miraculously wins $10,000 in the lottery), and daughter and father wind up thoroughly humiliated. Saunders usually understates the tragedy in his stories, and he does in this one, too, as it becomes clear later in the story that something truly horrific, which I won't describe here, has become a new status symbol in suburbia. Suffice to say, once the true horror of the story sets in, you feel a sudden shock of recognition.

A longer story in this collection, "Spiderhead," is familiar ground for fans of Saunders, for it describes the dystopian experiences of an average sort of guy in the not too distant future. In this story, the protagonist, Jeff, is a prisoner who is a guinea pig for experiments in neuroscience that involve flooding his body with artificial stimulants or depressants to gauge how he responds. Can he, for instance, be made to feel deep desire for a woman for whom he finds unattractive? Or, conversely, can he be made to feel emotionally detached as he watches a young woman become so anxious that she kills herself? The point of the experiments, it seems, is to see how commercially viable these new chemical compounds could be. "Spiderhead" is a genuinely scathing indictment, not so much at what American society is now but of what it might become in the next few years.

In some stories, such as "Exhortation," Saunders returns to a theme that he's explored often in his fiction: the miseries of being trapped in a soul-sapping mindless job. In "Exhortation," written in the guise of a cheerful memo, a mid-level manager tries to buck up the spirits of his sales staff, who have been missing their quotas, but his language is really just an implied threat to fire them all if they don't immediately meet their sales. It's reminiscent of the sales competition in Mamet's Glengarry Glen Ross: top salesman gets a Cadillac; second best, a set of steak knives; everyone else, a pink slip. Similarly, in “My Chivalric Fiasco,” a man working at a Renaissance theme park find himself promoted (from the janitorial staff to faux palace guard) in exchange for his silence after he witnesses his supervisor sexually assault a co-worker. Anyone who's ever been stuck in the drudgery of the working life can surely appreciate Saunders' irony as he skewers that dog eat dog world in these two stories.

Critics have rightly hailed Tenth of December as one of the best works of fiction of 2013, so I'm not alone in thinking it's a collection of stories that resonates deeply as you read it. Check it out!

The future of short fiction?

Nicholas Dames, in Public Books, has some very interesting observations about some recent best-selling collections of short stories, including those by George Saunders, Sam Lipsyte, Karen Russell, and Junot Diaz. After pointing out that short fiction has usually ranked lower than novels on the totem pole of esteem, Dames wonders if American literature is now entering a new phase in which short fiction will gain prominence because of its “elevator-pitch weirdness and intensity.” In other words, he argues that writers are no longer interested in the minimalist short fiction of the past 30 years and, instead, are spinning tales unlike anything readers have encountered before. Particularly new is the emphasis upon a unique narrative voice and tone:

If Gordon Lish’s effect on a generation-plus of writers was to enforce the severities of good technique (correct breathing, no belting), the story now seems to have embraced a pop faith: doesn’t matter how weird the voice, as long as it has style, even a strained, or peculiar, or mimicked style.

Dames further speculates that short fiction might well become the dominant genre in this age of limited attention spans and the small phone screens upon which people read stories. His article is extremely interesting and well worth reading.

PS: Tomorrow I’ll post my review of George Saunders’ Tenth of December. 

A slumgullion of new words

Kate Manning, writing in the Times, offers a plea for reinvigorating your voice by resurrecting archaic words:

By perusing period novels, magazines, advice books, letters, medical texts and sermons, contemporary novelists can conjure up a fresh narrative voice not only out of the vocabulary of bygone days, but from the rhythms of speech, the values of an era. A 19th-century “swell” is not going to speak the “secret language of crime,” but will have his own “vocabulum,” one that will reflect a worldview. 

Jhumpa Lahiri

Jhumpa Lahiri, who I teach frequently, is one of my favorite contemporary writers. I won't get to read her latest novel, The Lowland, until Christmas break, but I found this interview with her interesting. Reviews of the novel have been mixed so far.

Did Walt Whitman and Oscar Wilde hook up?

In this very entertaining piece, Mallory Ortberg details the evidence that these two writers enjoyed each other's company in a very intimate way during Wilde's tour of America in 1882.

Flash Fiction

Personally, I don't much care for "flash fiction," for I prefer to lose myself in a long, complicated novel. But such short shorts may be the future as our attention spans shrink and we read on our iPhones.

At any rate, I read one defense of the genre today:

Reading flash fiction takes work the way poetry takes work. For the reader who is willing to meet a story halfway, and who enjoys tight, brief, tense and precise fiction, flash – in a tiny space – throws the reader in and out of the human condition in profound and unpredictable ways. What could be more satisfying?

Visiting Deadwood

I first became fascinated by Deadwood when I watched David Milch's terrific HBO series of the same name. With its blend of superb acting, gorgeous photography, and truly extraordinary writing, it was one of the few perfect shows that I’d ever seen. Every episode would take my breath away.

I get down Deadwood every couple of years or so, usually when the South Dakota Festival of Books is in town. This year’s festival was this past weekend, so that’s when I was able to visit. Luckily (and it's important to have good luck in Deadwood—just ask Wild Bill Hickok), the weather was gorgeous, with highs around 70 and not a cloud in the sky.

In between strolls around the gulch, I took in many events over the two days. On Friday, I caught a joint appearance by Poet Laureate Ted Kooser and book critic Michael Dirda at the public library. This event was really more an informal “meet & greet” than anything else, but the library provided a tasty lunch of spicy shrimp (“free gratis,” as Al Swearengen would say).

Ted Kooser & Michael Dirda

Later in the day, at the new Deadwood Mountain Grand, the main location for the festival, I heard Brian Fagan deliver a bleak assessment about the future of the planet (global warming is going to swamp us with an unstoppable rise in the oceans) and Bill Heavey give a hilarious reading about catching frogs by hand at night in Louisiana. One of the keys, Heavey explained, was remembering not to grab for any red eyes reflected in the headlamp, for those eyes would belong to a ‘gator. I also sauntered through the book displays, but I successfully resisted the impulse to add to my already sagging shelves back home.

On Saturday, with my friend and colleague Deb Dragseth, I attended a presentation by Peter Heller, who read some excerpts from his novel Dog Stars and then talked about his experiences as a journalist on whitewater rafting trips and as a bush-pilot trainee. He was a dynamic, entertaining storyteller, so I know I'll be reading him in the future. Deb and I then took in a panel about the future of newspapers in America, but the panelists' forecast was so bleak that this ex-journalist would prefer to forget about it. As one panelist, NPR's Bob Garfield, said, not jokingly, journalism students today are like lab rats: They are raised only so they can be sacrificed.

Finally, that evening I was a patron at the Poetry Cafe, with Kooser, Naomi Shihab Nye, Christine Stewart-Nunez, and Heid Erdrich. The four read from their works and also talked about their careers and influences. The mood was light, helped (perhaps) by the beer available at the bar.

Banned Books Week

Next week is Banned Books Week, as proclaimed by the American Library Association, so I encourage you to provoke a prude or shock a scold by selecting one of these books from your local library. Stand up for your right to read what you want to read.

For example, did you know that the great novel Slaughterhouse Five, a book I teach regularly, was burned as obscene in North Dakota just forty years ago?

Lest you think that book bannings are passé, just two weeks ago the great novel Invisible Man was banned in North Carolina. I regularly teach this book, too, so I (as the Tar Heels would say) have “a dog in this hunt.” I'm proud to say that my home library, Stoxen Library at Dickinson State University, is a strong supporter of allowing people to read what they want to read.

I hope that you’ll join me in taking a stand against censorship!

First Amendment

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.

Death of British comic novels?

Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim is one of my all-time favorite novels. Not only is it hilariously funny, but also I’ve always identified with its title character, Jim Dixon, a man who finds himself adrift in the absurdities of academia. Better to identify with the Jim of Lucky Jim than with the Jim of Lord Jim!

The British have a long tradition of wonderful comic fiction, from Jerome K. Jerome’s Three Men in a Boat to P. G. Wodehouse’s stories about Jeeves. From Evelyn Waugh’s vicious satires of the upper class to David Lodge’s send-ups of small-time academic life. This small island has always been large on this particular stage.

In this week’s Guardian, Jonathan Coe, no slouch himself in the comic fiction department, muses about the possible death of this tradition. He speculates:

Indeed, the rational case for the stifling of laughter until our global problems have been soberly addressed and sorted out seems unanswerable. Jim Dixon may have had the cold war to worry about, but in other respects he seems to have been living in a fool's paradise, a bubble of provincial ignorance which today's novelists are simply not permitted to share. Where are the laughs in massacre, famine and climate change, exactly? What's so funny about the Middle East, North Korea and Afghanistan? Who's going to chuckle when they pick up the London Review of Books and find John Lanchester arguing, effectively as always, that the banking habits of the British people pose a greater threat to their own security than terrorism?

Ultimately, though, Coe, rereading Wodehouse, realizes that the “pure, unpolluted” zaniness of the Jeeves stories offer an escape from the realities of living in such dispiriting times.

What the River Carries

You might remember that a month ago I reviewed two books by Lisa Knopp, Interior Places and What the River Carries. I'm pleased to say that the latter has won the 2013 Nebraska Book Award for Non-Fiction (Essay).

Congratulations, Lisa!

Writing outside?

Carol Kaufman recommends writing outside as a way to get the creative juices flowing. It's not just fewer distractions or more quiet, however. As she points out:

Nature immersion also helps us feel alive. Another series of studies published in the Journal of Environmental Psychology in 2010 concluded that being in nature made people feel energetic and less lethargic, all essential ingredients for writing stories that exude telling details and narrative tension. After all, you just can’t tell a good story when half asleep.

The Tempest

Shakespeare’s last play, The Tempest, is one of my favorites. Like The Winter’s Tale, it’s a bit of an oddball drama as it blends potential tragedy with comedy, adding in some magic along the way. A recent film version, with the great Helen Mirren in the lead, reminds us just how timeless this play is.

In Shakespeare’s day, the play’s main theme, without question, is the restoration of order. In fact, the rightful Duke of Milan, Prospero, who lost his seat to his scheming brother, regains power after conjuring up a giant storm to wash ashore his brother and his other enemies, including the King of Naples. After teaching them a lesson and regaining his seat, Prospero matches his daughter, Miranda, with king’s son, which then ensures a long, happy reign for his family.

Contemporary readers, however, tend to concentrate on the theme of imperialism, especially focusing on the relationship between the master, Prospero, and his slave, Caliban, the native inhabitant of the island. Although their relationship had started out friendly, Prospero later accuses Caliban of attempting to rape Miranda, who had taught him to read and write. Prospero then enslaves Caliban, requiring him to perform backbreaking labor. But Caliban never loses his humanity, as shown through his eloquent laments about his lost island and his determination to restore his freedom. As he sings to his potential ally, the drunken Stephano:

No more dams I'll make for fish

Nor fetch in firing

At requiring;

Nor scrape trencher, nor wash dish

'Ban, 'Ban, Ca-caliban

Has a new master: get a new man.

Freedom, hey-day! hey-day, freedom! freedom,

hey-day, freedom!

The play has many parallels with the English colonial experience in the New World, including using alcohol to “pacify” the natives while encouraging them to see the pale-skinned invaders as gods. In fact, contemporary readers often sympathize with Caliban and see Prospero as an unfair tyrant who has illegally usurped the property of another.

Whether you choose to put such a “political” spin on the play or not, it’s well worth your time.

PS: If you need added inducement to read the play or check out a film version, it’s Shakespeare’s shortest play!

Lebanon

Lebanon (2009), an Israeli film that won a number of international prizes a few years ago, is a harrowing look inside a tank in the early days of Israel's invasion into Lebanon in June 1982. In fact, the point of view never leaves the tank until the very end as we are trapped inside the vehicle with our only view of the outside world through the tank's gunsights as it pans around the shattered cities it rumbles through. The experience gives us a glimpse into the lives of these crew members as they try to carry out their duties under incredibly trying circumstances.

The film is based on the experiences that its director, Samuel Maoz, had during that controversial invasion of Lebanon. He doesn't focus on the politics of the invasion, which was almost universally condemned around the world (except, of course, by the American government) and, instead, tells the story of four young men simply trying to survive. At one point, for example, they get lost behind enemy lines and have to trust two Lebanese militiamen who may or may not be leading them into a trap. At different times, a dead Israeli soldier and a live Syrian prisoner are stored in the tank, which increases the crew's anxiety and causes one of them nearly to break down.

Lebanon, with its shockingly gruesome images and intense emotional scenes, isn't for everyone. I certainly found it to be a compelling story, with a profound anti-war message, but I can imagine that some viewers won't be able to stomach its 90 minutes.

Anyone for a lit crawl?

Now here's a brilliant idea: the Lit Crawl. I think I'll build my next vacation around the one in London:

Ms. Russo, who heads the Manhattan and Brooklyn crawls, is one such veteran. Another is Mette Risa, an organizer of last weekend’s London Lit Crawl, a slate of seven events sprinkled through Soho and Covent Garden. To Ms. Risa, the only question about a Lit Crawl in London was why it hadn’t happened before.

“I think it’s the most obvious city for a Lit Crawl,” she said. “People love pubs. People love books.”

After all, what's better than a pint of beer and arguing about your favorite authors?

Messy creativity?

The argument is that a messy environment is a better stimulus to creativity. A few novelists and poets that I've known have had neat and orderly offices, but most of them work in offices that should be condemned as health hazards: leftover food and half-drunk cups of coffee, stacks of books and reams of paper threatening to topple over, dog or cat hair floating through the air.

When people ask me why I never became the novelist that I wanted to be, I reply, "I realized that I had nothing to say."

Maybe the problem is that I can't stand to have anything out of place? That I literally can't concentrate if the books are out of order in my bookcase?

Evolution and writing

Is there an evolutionary advantage to being a good novelist? Yes, argues Jennifer Vanderbes in The Atlantic. In fact, the ability to tell stories vividly (and to read them sensitively) offers a number of advantages:

Let’s look first at survival: Among the many things that set humans apart from other animals is our capacity for counterfactual thinking. At its most basic level, this means we can hypothesize what might happen if we run out of milk; in its most elaborate form—we get War and Peace. Stories, then, are complex counterfactual explorations of possible outcomes: What would happen if I killed my landlady? What would happen if I had an affair with Count Vronsky? How do I avoid a water buffalo? According to Denis Dutton, these “low-cost, low-risk” surrogate experiences build up our knowledge stores and help us adapt to new situations. (“Mirror neuron” research indicates that our brains process lived and read experiences almost identically.)  A good “cautionary tale," for example, might help us avert disaster. Stories can also provide useful historical, scientific, cultural and geographical information. Bruce Chatwin’s Songlines illustrates this on two tiers: In armchair-travel fashion, the book acquaints readers with the Australian Outback, while simultaneously describing how Aboriginals sang stories walking at a specific pace so that geographical markers within the story would guide their journey.

In addition to travelogues, stories also offer nuanced thought maps. An imaginative foray into another person’s mind can foster both empathy and self-awareness. This heightened emotional intelligence might, in turn, prove useful when forming friendships, sniffing out duplicity, or partaking in the elaborate psychological dance of courtship ...

Winter in Wartime

Winter in Wartime (2008) is the sort of movie that more people in America need to see. One of the most popular movies ever in its own country, the Netherlands, it tells the story of an adolescent boy, Michiel, in a small town during the latter years of WWII. His father, the town's mayor, collaborates with the occupying German army while his uncle, who lives with the family, works for the Resistance. Matters come to a head when Michiel finds a British pilot, Jack, who has parachuted into the woods around the town after his plane was shot down.

The movie, directed by Martin Koolhoven, manages to be heartfelt, without being sentimental, as Michiel disobeys both his father and his uncle, who have told him to stay out of the war, when he resolves to protect the pilot and smuggle him out of the country. Complicating matters, his sister, a nurse who treats Jack’s broken leg, has fallen in love with him. Soon afterward, the body of a German soldier turns up dead in the woods (Jack shot him the night he parachuted), and the German commander arrests Michiel's father and threatens to execute him if whoever killed that soldier isn't turned in. Michiel then has to decide whether to continue protecting Jack, which means that his father will be shot, or stick with his plan to get the pilot to safety.

The film features some truly extraordinary acting especially by Martijn Lakemeier, who plays Michiel, and Yorick van Wageningen, who plays Uncle Ben. The interaction between the two of them is compelling as Ben is the sort of big, burly bear of a man, always roughhousing with his nephew, that adolescent boys typically admire. Also extraordinary is the cinematography of this idyllic town and its lovely woods, which are in stark contrast to the brutality of the war.

I highly recommend Winter in Wartime, for I think you’ll find it one of the best films you’ve seen in awhile.

The rhythm method

Putting aside the fact that he admires two lousy writers (William F. Buckley Jr. and Tom Wolfe), Roy Peter Clark makes a good point in today’s Times when he argues the power of short sentences to make a point. But it’s not short sentences in isolation that are effective. No, it’s when they are in contrast to longer sentences that, in effect, have worked to set them up. Like diamonds glistening upon black velvet, these short sentences then stand apart and leave lasting impressions on their readers. It’s the rhythm method.

Ripper Street & Copper

Copper and Ripper Street are two BBC America series that pose essentially the same question: What would a police procedural television show look like if it were set in the 19th century? Both shows have their strengths, but, on the whole, I think Ripper Street is more successful.

Ripper Street, set in the London slum area frequented by Jack the Ripper just a few months earlier, stars Matthew Macfayden as police inspector Edmund Reid, who failed to catch the Ripper when he prowled the streets killing prostitutes. Now, the inspector, aided by stalwart Sergeant Drake (played by Jerome Flynn, who might be better known as Bronn in Game of Thrones) and American surgeon Homer Jackson (played by Adam Rothenberg), works to solve crimes that seem destined to remain unsolved, such as the case of a psychopath who killed a woman in an imitation of the Ripper and the case of a flour mill manager who wants to kill more people than the Ripper by poisoning bread.

Macfayden, as Inspector Reid, stands out as a man dedicated to getting to the truth of a case, even if that means pursuing suspects that his superiors would prefer left alone. His single-minded pursuit of justice, however, leads him to neglect his wife and alienates some of his colleagues. (By the way, Macfayden was absolutely terrific in the BBC mini-series Any Human Heart, based on the superb William Boyd novel.) His sidekick, Sgt. Drake, however, is loyal to a fault and never neglects to support him, even at the risk of his own life. Together, they form a formidable partnership of brains and brawn.

Although much of the setting is undoubtedly computer-generated, the slums of Whitechapel, with its beggars, prostitutes, drunkards, and thieves, acts as another character in the show. The level of detail is amazing as I can practically smell the stench of raw sewage and feel the soot in the eyes. Anglophiles hooked on Downton Abbey would be well served to watch this show to get a sense of “the real England,” which is certainly not the manor life of the Edwardian countryside.

In contrast to Ripper Street, Copper is set across the pond, in the Five Points slum area of New York City in 1864. It stars Tom Weston-Jones as Corky Corcoran, an Irish immigrant police sergeant who has recently served heroically in the Union Army. Although he's haunted by the memories of the daughter that died and the wife that ran away while he served, Corky is determined to see that even the poorest residents of Five Points get equal justice under the law. His former commanding officer, Robert Morehouse (played by Kyle Schmid), the scion of a wealthy family, and the black surgeon who treated him in the war, Matthew Freeman (played by Ato Essandoh), assist him in solving cases, including the threat of Confederate saboteurs infiltrating into New York City. Complicating matters for Corky is Mrs. Haverford (played by Anastasia Griffith), a beautiful widow who manipulates men into serving her own selfish needs.

The primary flaw in this series, for me, is that some of the plot twists seem gimmicky and clichéd and some of the characters are stereotypes. Corky, for example, is the typical hot-tempered but honest Irish police detective while Mrs. Haverford is the typical icy-blonde femme fatale, which means that their relationship is stormy but predictable. More interesting, I think, is the character of Matthew, a surgeon beyond ordinary competence, who continually has to prove himself because of the dark color of his skin. Too many subplots, however, leave this series feeling somewhat insubstantial, like it's not been fully developed.

I certainly don't think Copper is a bad show, but I do, however, think Ripper Street is superior.