Is the chorus singing "I told you so"?

The following from a Reuters news article:

Time Warner is requiring nearly 40 Internet companies in Texas to give up 75 percent of their subscriber fees and 25 percent of revenues from other sources such as advertising in order to gain access to its cable TV network, according to term sheets obtained by the Post.

In addition, the term sheets indicate Time Warner would get approval control over the Internet service providers' home pages and "prominent above-the-fold areas on the home page of the service for use."

I recall there being some concern, back when Time Warner first announced its $183 billion merger with AOL, that something exactly like this might happen if the deal went through. Time Warner promised to open its high-speed bandwidth (which provides access to almost 20% of cable customers nationwide) to competitors, and that seems to have pacified most of the critics.

If this move fails, I'm sure Time Warner will attempt to sally forth elsewhere. Companies like Time Warner and Microsoft, it seems to me, have a "scorpion" mentality. They may promise not to sting, but eventually, their nature will overcome their intentions.

Cheers...

Devouring "Hannibal""

One of the prizes I found while browsing through the books at the Goodwill store on Saturday was Thomas Harris' latest thriller, Hannibal. The price was right (99 cents, versus $8 cover price) and the money goes to a good cause. I finished it a short time ago. It is one of those books that is difficult to put down, and if you do, you feel itchy until you can pick it up again.

I ran across Harris by accident a few years ago, with the publication of The Silence of the Lambs. At the time, I was not aware that I'd read his two previous books, Black Sunday and Red Dragon; back when I did read them, I never thought to note the author's name, they were just a way to pass the time.

Yet upon reading Silence, I finally took notice of the name and writing credits and realized that I'd read his other books before. This was about the time that the film version with Jodie Foster and Anthony Hopkins hit the theaters. I knew that Black Sunday had been made into a film, and when I asked around about Red Dragon, it turns out that Harris had scored a cinematographic hat trick: all three of his books have been adapted for film. As is usually the case, the books have more, um, "meat" to them than the film adaptations.

I cannot tell you what draws me to Harris' fiction, or to the fiction of James Ellroy, while we're on the subject. I mention Ellroy only because in Hannibal, I notice that many of the characters - including a number who appeared in previous books - have surprising secrets, some of them quite seamy. I may not have noticed this of Harris' characters earlier; after reading Ellroy, though, I am sensitive to this kind of characterization.

So then, let's think a bit. What draws me to this kind of fiction?

Maybe it's the fact that the people who populate these stories are completely beyond the scope of any I've ever encountered in real life. Yet, the same could be said, however, of individuals in the Vienna Boys' Choir or clowns with the Russian circus. Indeed, isn't one of the reasons we read stories precisely because the characters are strangers to us?

That's an evasive answer, though there may be a grain of truth in there, somewhere.. Let's try again.

Maybe it's the opportunity to attempt to fathom the actions of someone obviously playing by a completely alien set of rules. Lecter is, after all, cultured, intelligent, and a cannibal. What drives a person like that? And in reading the book, the question of "What is going to happen at the end, when Lecter and Clarice Starling face off?" does loom ever larger and more suspenseful.

Perhaps the fascination of reading about such characters is the same as one might feel observing a viper or other dangerous creature in action. With no cage between you and the animal.

Weak. What else comes to mind?

Perhaps the attraction is associated with watching purposeful people interact in an extreme environment. If you compare this kind of fiction to what has come before, say to the best of Ian Fleming's Bond books (probably not the best example, but adequate for the argument), the latter come off as lukewarm. Now, understand, Fleming's fiction is classic and the stories hang together well today, but they tend to follow a formula. To be more precise, perhaps it would be more accurate to say they follow a certain convention. And that convention does not entail describing the details of removing and cooking the frontal lobes of a person's brain while they are awake, lucid, and sitting at the dinner table.

I digress once again. Let's dig a little deeper. Just one more time. Let's consider the proposition that - deep down inside - I either am like Lecter or want to be like him.

Well, there are certainly aspects of Lecter's life that are enviable. He likes the finer things, and he enjoys culture, music, and history. He lives a life of seeming leisure, pursuing his own interests, with no financial worries. He is decisive; goal-driven. He even has something of a sense of justice (his exploit with the deer poacher comes to mind).

So far, there's no down side, right?

But there is a down side. A big one. This fellow is, after all a cannibal and is capable of great cruelty. But if you think about it, his cruelty and cannibalism seem focused. He tends to victimize people who, in his mind, deserve it, or at least he doesn't victimize people at random. I recall there was another inmate, Miggs, at the insane asylum with Lecter in Silence who flung his semen at visitors. As long as these visitors were "losers" such as pshrinks coming by, trying to analyze Lecter, such behavior was okay, even encouraged. When Clarice Starling has semen flung at her, Lecter's feelings for her causes him to kill Miggs soon after (cause of death: swallowed tongue). Lecter later kills five people in his escape, literally slicing the face off of one of his victims to aid in his flight. We begin to understand that Lecter views a much broader range of alternatives available to him than we do for ourselves.

So, perhaps it is Lecter's ability to, um, so expeditiously "deal with" people who annoy him that has a kind of appeal. Who hasn't wished to have the ability to snap one's fingers and by so doing have all who vex us disappear? And perhaps there is vicarious pleasure in reading about someone who can do almost exactly that?

There may be something in this last. Or I may just be too caught up in my own self-analysis to make any sense of this at all. It's what I get for trying a little stream-of-consciousness writing.

The fact is that part of the fascination must also lie in our curiosity about what, exactly, is going on between Lecter and Starling. On the surface, she's the straight-shooting, honest FBI agent and he's the evil villain, but we know something else is there, beneath the surface.

And maybe the answer is as simple as that: I like such function because of good characterization and interaction between characters.

Does anyone else out there enjoy such fiction. If so, why?

Cheers...