CAESAR’S BATH MEME: Mansfield Fox throws me this thing, which I’d seen at various fine blog locales: “List five things that people in your circle of friends or peer group are wild about, but you can’t really understand the fuss over. To use the words of Caesar (from History of the World Part I), ‘Nice. Nice. Not thrilling . . . but nice.'”

Here goes. In order of how fast I thought of them.

1. “Buffy the Vampire Slayer.” I’ve watched a bunch of scattered episodes, and all of season… three? Whichever season ends in “Graduation Day.” I liked “Hush” (the silent episode) a lot–great mix of creepy and funny. I love Alyson Hannigan; she’s a terrific actress, and if she ever stars in anything non-horrible-looking I’ll go see it. Liked Faith, liked Giles. Had sneaking fondness for Cordelia and Wesley. The show is another example of genre entertainment as the one place in American arts where you can find depictions of team leadership. (Liked Wesley because he reminded me of bad leaders I’ve seen and/or been.)

But. a) Everyone praises the dialogue, but it generally sounds forced to me. Stylization that distracts rather than illuminates.
b) Buffy is irksome, Angel aggressively boring, their romance a thing of bathos.
c) The show’s mushy metaphysics really bothered me. Concepts like heaven, hell, and soul are deployed to manipulate the audience: to draw on the emotional resonance of these religious concepts without actually i) making sense or ii) having the underlying theology that gives those concepts their importance. The show should have gone for a straight-up pagan metaphysics rather than a veneer of Christianity. When Buffy was in “heaven,” what she describes sounds more like, maybe, the Elysian Fields–there’s certainly no sense of the beatific vision, or even cleansing from sin–but audiences wouldn’t have reacted as strongly to the Elysian Fields, so the heaven label got slapped on. This confusion of terms and concepts hurts the story, because you keep trying to figure out what the show is saying, or what the actual states of the characters’ souls are, when the show itself can’t answer those questions coherently.

2. Anthony Hopkins. Don’t have anything to say here; just don’t get it. Used to be more into him, I think.

3. Aristotle. I’ve said this before. Where’s the sublime?

4. Orthodoxy. Some insightful moments and powerful phrases, but also all of Chesterton’s worst tendencies on flagrant display: e.g., the same sentence three times in a row with different clever paradoxes, or all the “fairyland” wispiness. I recommend his saint biographies, St Francis of Assisi and The Dumb Ox: St Thomas Aquinas, but most people do seem to be more into Orthodoxy, so maybe I’m missing something.

5. Chinese food. This isn’t something any of my friends has a particular passion for; just something that everyone else seems to like more than I do.

Passing the meme-stick to: Cacciaguida; Dappled Things; Ratty . We’ll see if any of them take me up on it.