A Seraphim Dream

2012-02-04T10:37:00.000-08:00

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy Review

[Note: I am going to try to avoid too many spoilers in this review, despite what the next paragraph will say]

Here's what I would have to say about the new version of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy: watch it twice, or go and read the plot summary before you watch it. As with certain other forms of art (opera, Shakespeare, sporting events), TTSS can't really be appreciated on the first go-round unless you know what is going on.

Based on a John le Carre novel, TTSS manages to cram an enormous and windy plot into a two-hour film, and is one of the few adaptations that I would say needed to take more time to explore everything (the 1970s BBC adaptation with Alec Guinness was a seven-hour miniseries). The writers were very spare with exposition, and while everything you need to know about the plot is in the film, it's often hidden in inside jokes, in oblique dialogue, and in the aftermath of the action. You need to pay very, very close attention to everything that is going on, and I really don't know if it's possible to "get" everything without knowing something about the film first.

Case in point: towards the end of the film, one character is flush with triumph and another is devastated, but the whole situation is not mentioned or shown, other than a single, five second scene where one of them walks out of an office and passes the other, walking in. There's a beautiful look between the two of them that communicates what's gone on, but if you haven't paid close attention to the context, it just looks like one of them ate a bad egg with his salad and the other one is late for work.

Why is that? Well, TTSS is filled with characters who are intensely private, personal, paranoid, and political- the emotions and thoughts they carry are almost always veiled, and we have to work to decipher them. So the acting is layered, and so is the script, which disdains things like exposition. Instead of telling or showing us what happened, the film shows us the setup and then the aftermath, forcing viewers to really work to figure out what is going on in each scene, much as spies are forced to analyze and deconstruct the world around them (example: the scene that ends with one character bursting into tears at what he's done).

*WHEW*. I think every undergraduate art student and philosophy major just had a little moment of ecstasy there. "Look at how brilliant and subtle the symbolism in this film is! The rubes won't get it, but because we do, we're special!!!!!"

I, personally, am a big fan of clarity- real life is murky and unclear enough, thank you. As the famous Mr. Orson Scott Card says, "Anyone can write a story that's hard to decipher". While I don't need my films to spoon-feed me, I do expect films to stand on their own. What frustrates me is that TTSS seems to take this desire to have all the action and exposition offscreen a little too far, to the point where powerful moments feel hollow because we don't know enough about the context and have spent too much time trying to remember which character said what when.

Furthermore, because the film is so short (relatively speaking) and condensed, it feels like we're watching half of a movie, or the deleted scenes of a much longer movie. Important scenes and important relationships are reduced to significant glances and obfuscated remarks. If you go in with no idea who the traitor is, you'll figure out because he gets the most screen time of all the suspects- there wasn't enough time in the movie to really flesh out all of the characters, so the one with the most backstory is the one whodunnit.

And yet, if you can get past the waves of giddy film critics, TTSS is really a well-made, well-acted, enjoyable film. There isn't a weak link in the cast; and while Gary Oldman (as the protagonist Smiley) and Colin Firth have gotten the most acclaim (Firth in particular has an Oscar-worthy showpiece monologue towards the end), the supporting cast knocks each and every character out of the park. In particular, Benedict Cumberbatch as Peter Guilliam and Mark Strong as Jim Prideaux are impressive for their ability to make you forget about their previous roles altogether and embrace the characters they've created. The administrators are all appropriately pathetic and slimy, as portrayed by Ciaran Hinds, David Dencik, the aforementioned Firth, and Toby Jones with a brogue (while three of them get the short shift, I particularly wish that Jones had had more screen time). John Hurt doesn't have much to do as Control, the former M (or C, or whatever) of British Intelligence, other than one wordless moment in his office when he hears some bad news.

There are a number of scenes that are beautiful in the way they convey the simmering emotions that lie beneath the well-mannered stiff-upper-lip surface, and they contrast well with the (relatively) open and charismatic performance of Tom Hardy as rogue-ish agent Ricki Tarr, who narrates the middle third of the movie and sheds light on the first third (which goes otherwise unappreciated). And then there's Gary Oldman as Smiley.

One commenter I read said that he seemed "wooden", and it's hard to tell whether that quality is his performance or in the script itself. Smiley, after all, is a milquetoast, passive-aggressive, still character, and so there's not a whole lot for Oldman to work with. To get a read on it, I went to YouTube and looked up Sir Alec Guinness playing the same part in the BBC adaptation. Once you've seen TTSS, take a look at these two clips:

Smiley and Karla's conversation in Delhi (shown as a flashback in the adaptation and an anecdote in the film): http://youtu.be/zpFjjCiVpSs

Smiley breaking Toby Esterhaze (the airplane scene from the film): http://youtu.be/qHKiVwUbYvE

Guinness is brilliant. His Smiley radiates an aura of knowing menace that underlies his every word. He is a charismatic spymaster, quite like Gandalf (or for that matter, Obi-Wan Kenobi in Star Wars: A New Hope). You get the feeling that though he's retired and out to pasture, he used to be a nightmarish figure to his counterparts on the Soviet side of the curtain, and probably still is.

Oldman, on the other hand, is given a different context to work with. His Smiley struggles more: with social interaction, with his retirement, with his unfailing devotion to his contemptuous wife and contemptuous country. But it's all hidden behind his all-business "wooden" facade. Oldman ratchets down the level of energy he normally brings to roles (think "Commissioner Gordon", not the best role he ever played), and so it's quite shocking when, several times through the movie, Smiley's affected mildness breaks down and we see what's really behind there. It would be interesting to see what Smiley would have been like had he been raised in a different system (not the Circus), where he didn't survive by patronage and passive-aggressive action. I think he would have turned out more like Angleton, but anyways.

It's a good film, but a frustrating one. Call it Four out of Five moles caught.

2012-01-10T19:28:00.000-08:00

The Best the Americans Have to Offer Us, Part TWO: the Movies!

The actors/actresses I left off the list last time because I'm a moron:

Laura Linney, who is enough of a background actress that I wrote "Laura Dern" (also an excellent actress), despite her great performances in Mystic River, Breach, and even Lorenzo's Oil.
Chris Cooper, who quite capably stands in for the type of "menacing heavyweight" performances we would lazily shorthand someone in for, like Gene Hackman or Brian Cox.
Amy Adams, ~~who is on this list despite winning an Academy Award~~, deserves to be here because of two thankless roles she played, as the naive teenage nurse in Catch Me If You Can, and Mary the Wet Blanket Girlfriend in the Muppets. Both parts were written by the screenwriters to be as torturously awful for a performer as possible, and she came out looking pretty sharp in both of them. Oh, and apparently she was in some Catholic melodrama or something.

So, if you're keeping track, our hypothetical cast pool looks something like this:

-Sam Rockwell
-Stanley Tucci
-Paul Giamatti
-Jeffrey Donovan
-Summer Glau
-Jason Bateman
-Bruce Campbell
-Amy Acker
-Enver Gjokaj
-Tina Fey
-Kevin Bacon (cameo)
-Jay Harrington
-Harry Lenix
-Willem Dafoe
-Dule Hill
-Laura Linney
-Chris Cooper
-Amy Adams

Man. That is a murderer's row.

So, what projects could we have that would possibly require this caliber of acting? Great Britain found its contemporary author, John le Carre, and built a great film out of his most beloved work. Again, to stay with the "unknown but not forgotten" theme of these blog posts, the great and well-known works of literature are all out, so no Great Gatsby, no As I Lay Dying (thought it would be fun to see this cast do it!), no Song of Solomon, no race-neutral Huck Finn, etc.

What are we good at, in a literary sense, in America? There are a few things that America is good at, but the problem is, many of them are things that other countries are also good at (e.g. video games). So what is America really really good at, and also totally dominant in the world scene on (too many prepositions here)?

-Basketball (pre-1990s)
-War (pre-1970s)
-Software
-Interactive Text Fiction
-Franchise restaurants (I swear I'm not ripping off a Neal Stephenson rant here)
-DIY industries
-Log rolling
~~-Women's Softball~~
-Marketing movies (note I didn't say "Making movies", but "Marketing movies"...I'll wager there are 2000 kids in Delhi who have seen "Mission Impossible 4" for every American who's actually watched an Indian blockbuster like Endhiran)
-Lawsuits
-Toilet Paper
-Pharmaceuticals (for reasons that have nothing to do with America and everything to do with American patent law and the insurance-industrial complex)
-Standardized tests
~~-Young adult fiction~~ (Roald Dahl, by himself, negates America's claim to this category)
-Science fiction....well wait a second here!

So yes, Americans are pretty ridiculously good at Science Fiction (and Fantasy, but I lump them together for convenience's sake, since my literary genres are determined entirely by Barnes and Nobles' shelving practices, e.g. I consider "Teen Paranormal Romance" to be a genre now). For a variety of reasons, America has a rich and deep tradition of having strong science fiction writers, and as Orson Scott Card will be glad to tell you (scroll about halfway down the page), science fiction represents some of the strongest and most innovative storytelling that America has to offer.

But wait! you cry. America doesn't have a monopoly on science fiction!

OK, I say. How many great non-American science fiction authors can you, hypothetical but extremely well-read and non-Anglosphere-centric reader, name, off the top of your head?

Non-American Science Fiction Writers:
-H.G. Wells (War of the Worlds and the Time Machine)
-Jules Verne (20,000 Leagues Under the Sea)
-ARTHUR C CLARKE, the MAN (too many to count)
-Charles Stross (The Atrocity Archives and Accelerando)
-Stanislav Lem, who's like the hipster Arthur C Clarke (and was a better writer, but don't say that too loud). (The Cyberiad)
-J.R.R. Tolkein, who might be the greatest creator of the 20th Century (Lord of the Rings)
-Alan Moore (Watchmen)
-Neil Gaiman (Sandman and numerous short stories)
-Susannah Clarke (Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell)
-Tim Powers (Declare)
-J.K. Rowling (Harry Potter)

and...um...

Yeah, that's right. Here's America's heavy guns:

-Robert Heinlein
-Isaac Asimov
-Ursula K. LeGuin (Ursula, Isaac, and Bob have written as much, and had as much impact on the genre as the entire above list)
-David Brin (Startide Rising and I hate him, but that's a different story)
-Larry Niven (Ringworld)
-Octavia Butler (Dawn)
-Poul Anderson (Don't remember, but he's EVERYWHERE)
-Frank Herbert (Dune)
-The Game of Thrones Guy (Game of Thrones)
-Robert Jordan (Wheel of Time)
-Michael Flynn (Eifelheim)
-Orson Scott Card (Ender's Game)

Are these too old-school for you? How about some of that "Cyber-punk" or "Alternate History" you young people like to read?

-William Gibson (Neuromancer, the Difference Engine)
-Harry Turtledove (every alternate universe novel you ever read)
-Harlan Ellison (stories that inspired/were ripped off by 50% of the science fiction movies produced by Hollywood)
-Philip K. Dick (the other 50%, or maybe 60%)
-Neal Stephenson (Cryptonomicon, Snow Crash, the Baroque Cycle)
-Bruce Sterling (Distraction, the Difference Engine)
-Cory Doctorow (a bunch of books, which, for respect for his strongly held beliefs about the sanctity of copyright, I won't name)
-Malcolm Gladwell (kidding, guys, seriously)

And that's not even going into the long line of editors and film producers who helped breathe life onto the spark that was science fiction culture in 20th Century America (Rod Sterling, Gene Roddenberry, John W. Cambell). I'm sleepy, and I assume if I had written this post in a more awake state there would be more that I wouldn't be too lazy to list.

The point is, if America is to produce a movie for the hypothetical Movie Olympics (or maybe the Movie World Cup- it's a much more adversarial event), it will have to be a science fiction movie.

What work could we use? There are numerous, but because of the ensemble nature of our cast, we do have certain limitations, and I am also cheating a little by thinking we can do either a two-part movie, a three-hour movie, or an HBO-type miniseries.

That being said, I'm proud to preview the first two of the (extremely biased) selections I made for a hypothetical project pitch! Here they are: (drum roll)

-A miniseries-length adaptation of Frank Herbert's Dune
-A miniseries-length adaptation of Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon

....to be continued!

2011-12-29T08:41:00.000-08:00

New Year's Resolutions (DRAFT)

So here's a list of things I'd like to do differently next year:

1) Stop starting business meetings by introducing myself as "Hi, I'm a new hire on the IS Core Team, and [jump on table and wrap cape around self dramatically] I'M BATMAN!!!"

2) Stop going to work in a cape and Batman mask.

3) Blog once a ~~day~~ ~~week~~ ~~month~~ ~~more often than I have in the past~~ I get done watching "How I Met Your Mother"

4) Finish "How I Met Your Mother"

5) Build a cave under my house.

6) Learn how to ~~program VBA~~ make pretty graphs in Excel.

7) Stop reading liberal-propaganda websites written by trolls, and Reddit.

8) Run for President, if only to steal enough of Ron Paul's votes so he doesn't win.

9) Save Gotham City. Again.

10) Eat more vegetables (by going to Chipotle more often)

2011-10-23T17:38:00.000-07:00

The Best the Americans Have to Offer Us, Part One

Coming out this winter is Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, a film based on the seminal spy novel by John le Carre. While purists and old-timers will point to the seven-part BBC miniseries as the only "true" version of the le Carre story, I'm quite excited to see it, based on the trailer (which uses Danny Elfman's "Wolf Suite" from the Wolfman to excellent effect) and of course, the cast list:

-Gary Oldman
-Colin Firth
-Tom Hardy
-Mark Strong
-John Hurt
-Benedict Cumberbatch
-Toby Jones
-Ciaran Hinds

That's basically the 2007 New England Patriots of British actors, an All-Star team that I'm delighted to see put together on screen. It's like Harry Potter, if the unbelievable acting talent there wasn't playing second fiddle to a bunch of kids and CGI creatures (and also if that seven-part series was condensed down to one movie). The only actors who I wish they had shoehorned in are ~~Geoffrey Rush~~ Edit: Australian, Alan Rickman, and Jonathan Pryce.

Obviously, we're missing all the distinguished luminaries that people think of when they think of British actors (known to geeks everywhere as "the guys who took us seriously"): Patrick Stewart*, Ian McKellan, Christopher Lee, Ben Kingsley, Michael Gambon, Imelda Staunton, Judi Dench, Helen Mirren, Ralph Fiennes, ~~Morgan Freeman~~, Michael Caine, Ray Winstone, etc. etc. However, in addition to being younger, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy's cast is composed mostly of people who have played supporting roles in other people's films: it is a film made of utility players, role players, blue-collar players, glue guys, scrappy guys who just love the game- in other words, the "small unathletic white guys"of the acting world, who suffer from a condescending discrimination similar to the racism of big-time sports (but that's a different column altogether).

So, given that I plan on running for office someday, I thought I would undergo a patriotic thought experiment (similar to the "What if Ghenghis Khan Was American" column I wrote in 1961), to try to find a similar hypothetical movie that would make me as excited about a crackerjack cast. It would be too easy to go directly for "classic" star power (as in Glengarry Glen Ross, which included Alec Baldwin, Al Pacino, Jack Lemmon, Ed Harris, Kevin Spacey, Alan Arkin, and Jonathan Pryce as the token Brit), so big names like Morgan Freeman, Samuel L Jackson, Tom Hanks, Bruce Willis, John Travolta, Harvey Keitel, Jeff Bridges, and everyone else who's been in a Tarantino film etc. are all out.

Here's the pool of talent I want to pick from:

-Sam Rockwell: My advice is to put on your astronaut suit (everyone has one of those at home, right?) and watch Galaxy Quest, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, and Moon back-to-back-to-back, then watch Matchstick Men and Iron Man 2 back-to-back, and just marvel at his ability to play a wide variety of total losers, and make them all loveable. Somehow.

-Stanley Tucci: The American answer to Alan Rickman. Repeat after me kids: "Stanley Tucci makes every movie better. Stanley Tucci makes every movie better. Stanely Tucci makes every movie better..." I think he may have won an Oscar for ~~"Heavenly Creatures"~~ "The Lovely Bones", but everything the man touches turns to gold. Watching him in "The Devil Wears Prada" was probably his finest moment, and "Lucky Number Slevin" was amusing as well, but my personal favorite is the scene in "Big Trouble" where he meets his employers in a garage. Watch what he does with his wig.

-Paul Giamatti: You would think that this guy did nothing but play poets and down-on-their-luck-but-scrappy-loveable-underdogs, but behind those soulful singer's eyes lie a sociopathic murderer. Never forget.

-~~Christian Bale, in a cameo role~~ Edit: Apparently he's Welsh, and was the lead in some art film called "The Dark Knight". Bummer.

-Jeffrey Donovan: better known as "the Voiceover guy from Burn Notice", Donovan has a great ability to let us watch emotions roil around inside while his face and body show nothing. He also convinced the producers of Burn Notice to let him fake every accent in the book (emphasis on "fake"), and this is an ability that needs to be exploited (see from about 4:05 onward in this clip).

-Summer Glau: Poor Summer has been pigeonholed into the same role she played in "Firefly", but I'm convinced she has a wider range than she's showed in Sarah Connor Chronicles, etc. Alternately, she could channel her real-world experience of getting hit on by every single straight male geek in the Western Hemisphere (and half of the gay ones) and play Amy Shaftoe in an HBO miniseries-type adaptation of Cryptonomicon. Also she was on Dollhouse ~~with Amy Acker, and so could help convince her to rescind the restraining order she has against me~~ which was a severely underrated Joss Whedon show that didn't deserve its cancellation.

-Jason Bateman: Of course, we know him from Arrested Development, but it wasn't until much, much later that I realized he's the "idiot sportscaster" from Dodgeball. He is the Millenial's version of Michael Keaton: good comedic timing, everyman sort of quality, but with an ability to switch to dark at the drop of a hat. So long as they don't shove him into a Batsuit I think we'll be OK.

-Gary Oldman: After starring in classics such as Fifth Element and Batman Begins edit: Apparently he's British.

-Bruce Campbell: If I were President, there would be a law that Bruce Campbell has to cameo in every single film.

-Amy Acker: ~~The most gorgeous actress to come through Hollywood~~ Amy Acker is another Joss Whedon alum who has ~~a restraining order against me~~ been given an unfair shake by the media establishment; I am convinced if she ~~had the kind of Hollywood body that idiots think is "beautiful"~~ was five years younger and a little curvier she not only would she have played the main role in Dollhouse, the show wouldn't have been canceled and her ~~goddess-like face would grace the cover of every magazine and billboard from here to the Attic~~ career would be taking off too fast to include on a list like this one. I would post the clip from "Vows" here to show off her talents but unfortunately YouTube is filled with ~~like-minded individuals~~ people who want to make corny music videos.

-The Guy Who Played Hans Gruber in Die Hard: OK, this is just annoying now.

-Enver Gjokaj: This is really the last Whedon alumni on the list, I swear. I haven't seen him in anything other than Dollhouse, but his dead-on impressions of Reed Diamond (Mr. Dominic) and Fran Kranz (Topher) are Hall-of-Fame-worthy, and he did a pretty decent job with Victor, too.

-Tina Fey: This is a cheat; Tina Fey is an incredibly successful TV actress but hasn't spent much time in the cinema world, so I'm counting her as a "supporting" player. Deal with it.

-Kevin Bacon (in a cameo): His turn in X-Men: First Class, where he played a swingin' 60s Sebastian Shaw and chewed the scenery like he had already won an Oscar for Scent of a Woman, goes into Hall-of-Fame status. Like Willem Dafoe in "Boondock Saints" (see later down this list), Bacon already knew he was a better actor than any of the schmoes he was with (this is called the "I Already Rock" factor, or the Willem Dafoe Role) and so didn't bother with the whole "I'll prove how great an actor I can be...look how SUBTLE I am!!!" thing; instead, we got him starting the Cuban Missile Crisis with his accents. Although his inclusion in numerous films and the game that's named after him would otherwise disqualify him from this list, I think it's acceptable to ask for a cameo.

~~-Tilda Swinton~~ I should have guessed that one.

-Jay Harrington: Jay is partially responsible for the incredible terribleness of the U.S. version of "Coupling" (don't even YouTube it; it will make you depressed), but he is also partially responsible for the awesomeness of Better Off Ted, which makes everything forgiven. Unfortunately, I think he'd be competing for the same role as Jason Bateman, and I'm not sure how that one will end up.

-Harry Lenix: OK, really, this is the last Whedon alum. Poor Harry got jerked around by terrible, terrible screen writing in The Matrix Revolutions AND Dollhouse; he deserves at least one good role.

-Willem Dafoe: Dafoe is the reigning king of the "I Already Rock" roles for his turn as a gay FBI agent in Boondock Saints (seriously, the entire movie is worth watching just for the two-minute sequence where he reconstructs a murder in a strip club). However, he also brings to the plate ~~nuanced, thoughtful~~ portrayals of such characters as the Green Goblin and the creepy gas station attendant from eXistenz.

-Dule Hill: While this may seem like an odd choice, recall that Psych would fall apart without Gus, ~~both from a logical and~~ from a humorous standpoint. It is incredibly difficult to pull off a straight-man role, and Hill fills the bill. (and now my girlfriend will come after me with an axe).

-~~Cate Blanchett~~ You gotta be kidding me. I need to find a good State Department agent and get her repatriated here...

Coming in Part 2: What kind of a movie project do we put together for the Dream Team?

2011-09-07T19:07:00.000-07:00

The Monkey Parable
(as told by a CoWorker)

There once were some scientists, who, in the time before the ASPCA, decided to test some monkeys.

They set up a large cage with a very long ramp on one end that winded all the way along the sides, to reach the top of a "peak", on which they put a basket of juicy, sweet fruit.

They then put a monkey in the cage. The monkey sniffed, smelled the fruit, and climbed all the way up to the top. When he got there, he reached out for the fruit, and the researchers hit him with a blast of ice-cold water that knocked him off the peak.

Confused, he climbed the ramp again, reached out again, and got knocked around by the ice-cold jet spray again. The monkey was smart; he only needed to be shown twice that going to the top of the peak would result in him being attacked.

They then introduced a second monkey. The first monkey sat placidly and watched while the second one climbed to the top. The second monkey reached for the fruit, and the researchers blasted him with water, but they also blasted the first monkey, who hadn't done anything. It was repeated a second time, and the second monkey learned not to go to the top of the ramp, and the first one learned that if ANYONE went to the top he would get attacked.

Third monkey introduced, third monkey goes to the top, and this time, all three are blasted with water. When third monkey decides to go up to the ramp again, the first and second monkeys beat him up. The third monkey realizes if he goes up the ramp, the other two will beat him up.

Monkey #1 is removed, and #2 and #3 see #4 enter and try to go up the ramp. They beat up #4 to keep him from going up the ramp.

Monkey #4 is confused, but then when #2 is taken away, he helps #3 beat up #5 to keep him from going up the ramp, even though the researchers put away the hose. And so on it goes, with each subsequent monkey helping keep other monkeys from going up the ramp, without ever knowing why.

Moral of the story: think about what we do sometimes. Are we monkeys?

(Some people think so)

2011-08-31T19:50:00.000-07:00

Summer Book Reviews (Where I Brag About My Erudition)

Edit: forgot a book, which, when I realized it, made me drop the grade a little.

New books I read this summer:

How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe, Charles Yu (B-): I dropped the grade from a B+ because I had forgotten I read this book this summer, which calls into question how good it really is. Yu creates a mind-bending universe with lots of little metafictional tidbits; after a while I got really irritated and shut off the part of my brain that was trying to make sense of it (Douglas Adams did all this much, much better). However, while Yu is not a great SF writer, he is a great writer: his story is really about a boy trying to reconnect with his broken family, and it's hard not to empathize with the well-drawn characters he creates.

Declare, Tim Powers (A): A really, really good mashup of spy fiction (compared to Le Carre, but the comparison I would make is a pulpy Robert Ludlum), Cold War history, and fantasy (maybe a little on the Eldritch Horror side).
The world-building is well done and mixes together fact and fiction as well as does Eifelheim, which is the undisputed champ in the fantastic-history realm (see below). Oddly enough, Declare also deals with faith and redemption the way Eifelheim does. Declare's only issue is that it is really dense (you have to know a little Arabic and French, and be willing to read Wikipedia a lot), and often the density obscures the plot, which is suitably twisted but sometimes obscured by all the stuff Powers throws in.

Foucault's Pendulum, Umberto Ecco (a generous C): Ecco is, in some ways, a genius, and extraordinarily well-read; unfortunately his work (as translated into English by William Weaver) doesn't hold up very well as fiction. Foucault's Pendulum has some great historical oddities strung together to make an interesting theory or two, and a few nice character moments, but its plot isn't interesting until the very, very end, and all the cool symbolism, funny stories (Aglie is the man...or is he!?!), and themes get buried under minutiae and self-congratulatory cleverness. It's not meant to be a thriller, but it also struggles to make points about the human condition; long-form essay might have suited the ideas better than the world Ecco tries to put before us.

Sense and Sensibility, Jane Austen (C+): "Dear Jane," said her Editor, "We really liked Pride and Prejudice, but could you cut out all that lowbrow 'humor' and 'satire' stuff for your next one? It makes the book too accessible to the lower class, and we can't have uneducated people reading our books, of course. Also, we need a heroine who isn't as...interesting as that Bennet woman. I know it might seem like the editorial staff is going against your wishes, but basically, we outvote you. Laughing Out Loud! Women can't vote in this country! Unless you move to New Zealand or something. Rolling On the Floor and Laughing Out Loud! Anyways, make the cuts we want and a sandwich, and we'll have some quid for you, that's a good girl."

The Sociological Imagination, C. Wright Mills (C): Mills has some interesting points to make about the effect of the postwar world on science and philosophy, but his tone is so self-righteous and snarky that it's difficult to imagine him being correct about anything at all when he casually brushes aside entire domains of social science. The Girlfriend has informed me that all sociologists tend to be critical of each other, as a healthy way of encouraging critical thought in the field*; I prefer thinking that Mills failed his stats courses in college and couldn't pick up women in bars, so of course he was going to say that statisticians and interviewers were unskilled bozos. Furthermore, Mills' thoughts on big-picture society reads as being somewhat dated; in the 1950s and '60s, it might have been radical to suggest that capitalism as a whole might not have had an entirely beneficial effect on mankind (actually Death of a Salesman came out ten years earlier, so Mills wasn't even cutting edge in his own time), but it isn't anymore. See? That's me using Mills' tone. Do you like it? I didn't think so. (Full disclaimer: Paul Lazarsfield is the only sociologist I can remember reading in undergrad and thinking, "that's a cool set of ideas", and so Mills attacking him definitely lowered Imagination's grade)

The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, Erving Goffman (A-): The Girlfriend is a huge fan of Goffman, so of course he has to get an A, because I want to present myself as being intellectual and supportive to her. (See? That's me using Goffman...oh nvmd). In all seriousness, Goffman has points to make that are actually interesting, and touch on epistemology, which is one of the themes that I throw around in casual conversation to make myself seem smart to the people whose attention and approval I so desperately crave. Although his examples are a little dated (e.g. "girls who want to date handsome boys often act so stupid they could be extras on Paris Hilton's reality-TV series", p87**)

Wolves of the Calla, Stephen King (B): The book is split into two different sections, one of which is a wonderful Western/science fiction mix about the power of united communities to overcome great odds, with a dollop of Weirdness to keep you on your toes, and the other is a schlocky semimystical romp through alternate versions of New York that drag the entire thing to a screeching, crashing halt. I think the atmosphere of the Western overcomes the melodramatic-ness of the other story, in the same way that Lost was able to overcome its cliched pulp mysteries with good stories about interesting characters.

Song of Susannah, Stephen King (C- or D+): "Dear Stephen", said the Editor, "We really liked Wolves of the Calla, but could you cut out that Western nonsense? It makes the story too interesting and- WHO AM I KIDDING I'M STEPHEN KING I DON'T HAVE AN EDITOR HA HA I AM MY OWN EDITOR HA HA HA I'M EDITING MY OWN WORK ISN'T THAT META, HEY META SOUNDS LIKE "METAL", MAYBE I SHOULD WRITE ABOUT METAL MUSIC THAT IS ACTUALLY ALL THE METAL IN THE WORLD, SO ITS META METAL, YEAH-------

The Domino Effect, Timothy Zahn (B- or C+): Whew! This one reads quick (finished it in a day) and sets up its universe and its problem very very quickly so you can get right to the twisty, turny plot (I didn't realize it was the fourth book in a series until a third of the way through). Lots of neat ideas, but nothing I could really put my finger on as being particular original or standoutish. A good book to bring to the beach.

Anathem, Neal Stephenson (A-): This is the book I was hoping for from Foucault's Pendulum. If you are interested in math, classical philosophy and Socratic dialog, quantum mechanics, and astrophysics, check it out, but try to read as little as possible about it before you do. I mean it. No reviews, no book jackets, no Wikipedia references. Don't read the intro and don't read the glossary in the back. Just start the book. I'm normally pretty spoiler-happy, but there's an ultimate point to the twists in Anathem that you will totally miss if you decide to spoil it for yourself

*SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS*

Stephenson, in a neat little stylistic turn, puts you, the reader, into a similar state as the main characters, by setting you up in a cozy little world filled with conscious and unconscious assumptions about what you know, and then constantly shocking you by showing you that what you thought all along was completely wrong, in the same way that the characters in the book have strong assumptions ripped apart by reality (in more ways than one). ACK! Can't say anymore! Go Read It!

*I totally made that up

**I totally made that up too; the quote is on page 22

2011-07-20T09:42:00.000-07:00

The Magic (of the) Library

I have always loved the library, for many reasons. It's full of books, and I've always loved books (even when I couldn't read). It carries a very strong connection to the idea of "home" for me; when I lived overseas we would come back to the US for breaks and such, and my parents would always take me to the library. Also, when we came home in the summer, the library would always have its air-conditioning set to "Earth-Killing Mode", and you know that any place where they lower the internal temperature to that of a meat freezer is a place where you want to hang out (to help me appreciate this point, my family would always have us play on the playground across the street in the Human-Killing Humidity before we would go into the library itself).

My public library when I was growing up didn't have wireless Internet (nobody did) or a coffee shop or a play pen or avant-garde architecture; but it was clean, and big (to a child), and cold (did I mention it was always cold inside?) and it was full of books. The librarians (they were all ladies, and older ones too; I didn't meet a male or under-40 librarian until I was in high school) were friendly and never judgmental about my reading choices; they sponsored different events at the library, including a children's puppet show that came in and showed how evil developers turn primeval untouched thousand-year-old forests into strip malls if Kids Like You don't beg their Powerful Parents to stop being capitalists (I think I have that right).

At the public library I would check out 10 books at a time (mother's limit), and most of them were about a specific subject as I grew older:

1st grade: Cowboys
2nd grade: Cowboys
3rd grade: Submarines (Hunt for Red October is a life-altering movie, dude- "I would have liked to have seen Montana"- and it taught me that The Star-Spangled Banner is NOT, in fact, the coolest anthem in the world)
4th grade: Submarines, but with actual technical details instead of pretty drawings
5th grade: STAR WARS (my uncle gave me a copy of Specter of the Past, which blew my mind...there was a Star Wars after the movies? With years and about 10,000 pages of perspective (not kidding; I read through every one of the New Jedi Order novels except for Dark Journey, which was just too emo, and a lot of the "Classic" EU stuff too, X-Wing, Kevin Anderson's, etc.) I realized Specter of the Past and its sequel were about as good as it was going to get- maybe it's not good to start a kid there.
6th grade: Star Wars AND Star Trek (what, you think I thought all of science fiction was confined to the brainchild of George Lucas? Give me credit for refined tastes here). The two books I remember are Dreadnaught! (which, although I didn't know it at the time, is a perfect example of the Mary Sue archetype story) and The Great Starship Race, which was...amusing. Let's leave it at that.

And on and on. We stopped going to the library often (although we supplemented it with trips to Barnes and Nobles), but the damage was done. I still love libraries, making the trek to the one around the corner from my house every month or so.

As with Used Book havens, I view libraries as a way to find things that are obscure, bizarre, or otherwise marvelously serendipidous. On today's trip, I went to find a couple of books on Sociology, and also Wolves of the Calla, and instead spent most of the time browsing Writer's Market, dreaming of glory (but that's another story). You never know what you'll find there (although there's a surprising number of people looking at...stuff on the computers).

Support your libraries! All I'm sayin'

2011-07-11T17:54:00.000-07:00

Courses I Wish I Had Taken in College

Statistics: I don't actually give two s***s (+/-1 s***) about standard deviation, but understanding statistics helps you to understand assumptions about correlation and causation, two things that are murkier than they seem. Also, it would help me to win arguments, as some people seem to think statistics make everything right.

A Broad Intro Sociology Course: Not just because my girlfriend is a sociology major, but because sociology is one of those murky and ill-defined subjects (like "Cultural Anthropology" and "Semiotics"), and a course I took on it (the applications of classic social capital and such to online social networks) didn't really help.

Fencing: I tried fencing for a grand total of 45 minutes, and I was terrible at it. Like, terrible. But I think that the value that I add to the world would be immeasurably greater if I could stab people.

Any ROTC Course: Just to see what was up.

The Motion Video Course: Making montages with fancy editing and rotoscoping all day, for credit? YES. Except not at 8:45am, which is when this course was offered. My laziness regarding waking up in the mornings also prevented me from taking an intro to Statistics course, and from going insane my senior year.

2011-06-29T14:58:00.000-07:00

Booklist for Summer 2011

Here are the books I have either read or am planning on reading this summer (if I've read it a grade goes next to it, and I will try to edit in a review here):

Declare, Tim Powers (A): A really, really good mashup of spy fiction (compared to Le Carre, but the comparison I would make is a pulpy Robert Ludlum), Cold War history, and fantasy (maybe a little on the Eldritch Horror side). The world-building is well done and mixes together fact and fiction as well as does Eifelheim, which is the undisputed champ in the fantastic-history realm (see below). Oddly enough, Declare also deals with faith and redemption the way Eifelheim does. Declare's only issue is that it is really dense (you have to know a little Arabic and French, and be willing to read Wikipedia a lot), and often the density obscures the plot, which is suitably twisted but sometimes obscured by all the stuff Powers throws in.

The Parafaith War, L.E. Modesitt (re-read, B): Fun space opera. Some extremely preachy and particularly offensive sections dealing with the enemy "Revenants" (basically, the worst of Muslims combined with the worst of Mormons, with a little racism thrown in too) keep it from being a real masterwork. Uses the gender-neutral word "ser" as a sign of respect; oddly enough, so does Startide Rising and The Uplift War.

The Jennifer Morgue, Charles Stross (re-read, A-): Second book in the Laundry Files series. Probably the wittiest of the three (to date) Laundry Files books; this one deals with the stereotypical James Bond-type plot in amusing fashion.

The Fuller Memorandum, Charles Stross (re-read, B): Third book in the Laundry Files series. Stross goes into a little more detail and turns up the H.P. Lovecraft "existential horror" factor, laying groundwork for a presumable Apocalyptic confrontation later in the series, but this novel isn't as witty or engaging as the previous two; the comparative lack of droll satire (sorry, but the "zombie janitors, zombie librarians" don't match what he put together in The Atrocity Archives and The Jennifer Morgue) combined with the heavier stakes make this one feel unnecessarily weighty, and makes us less forgiving of the unexplained plot turns and such.

Foucault's Pendulum, Umberto Ecco

Dune, Frank Herbert (re-read, A-): Comparisons to The Lord of the Rings cycle is apt; it can be dry (heh heh, cause deserts don't have much water, geddit?), and the characters are all acting out the parts of Heroic Fantasy Archetypes, but the world-building and level of detail Herbert sprinkles (heh heh, cause spice gets sprinkled on stuff, geddit?) combine to make for an engrossing read. The way he bases the story on mythology of Europe aristocratic gamesmanship and the Middle East uprisings makes it familiar but not predictable/boring, and the presence of words and concepts that are no longer quite obscure in American culture (like jihad) gives the reader an uneasy view of the story, much like Stephen King's The Gunslinger.

Sense and Sensibility, Jane Austen

Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters, Ben H. Winters and Jane Austen

Wolves of the Calla, Stephen King

Cryptonomicon, Neal Stephenson (re-read, A+): Favorite book evah? Favorite book evah. You really have to read it three or four times to "get it", but its surface-level material is so entertaining it doesn't feel like a chore. A certain amount of Renaissance-man-type geekiness is required to appreciate the extensively-researched jokes, and I can certainly understand why people believe he needs an editor with a firmer hand. But that doesn't detract from how incredibly multi-threaded yet well-integrated the novel is. I've never read any of Pynchon's work from start to finish (sorry Mason and Dixon) but this is how I imagine it to be, if Pynchon wanted you to actually enjoy his writing. There is an army of distinctive characters drawn in Dickensian style, but including a handful of well-developed and developing ones that show up in the three/four plot threads. It is written like an epic, but feels like a character piece until you really start to get into it. I hope someday to write something as good as Cryptonomicon, but I doubt that I can.

For Whom the Bell Tolls, Ernst Hemingway

Snow Crash, Neal Stephenson (re-read, A-): Also one of my favorite novels, but not quite as earth-shatteringly good as it was when I first read it. Partly because the tech is outdated (but, unlike Cryptonomicon, does not ground the story in a peculiar time period), partly because Distraction did mostly the same thing, and partly because the satirical elements become a little too unwieldy after you've been surprised by them once. Still a lot of fun, and the description of Hiro's worries (or lack thereof) about Raven will go down as one of the all-time great tracts.

Distraction, Bruce Gibson (re-read, A-): Almost a carbon copy of Snow Crash, but just wry enough and inventive enough to make it stand on its own. Gibson approaches the idea of a collapsing Pax Americana much differently than Stephenson does; rather than exploring the libertarian hyper-consumerism of an '80s capitalist nightmare, he draws on trends from the early 00's (open-source, non-hierarchical organizations) and takes a little more liberal view of transhumanism. Fun times.

Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, Susannah Clarkson (re-read, A): Neil Gaiman described this book as "the finest work of English literature of the past 70 years", and while I wouldn't go that far (has he read Cryptonomicon? /chandlerbing), it's definitely one of the top 5 or 10. Clarkson is a wonderful world-builder with a great handle on how to parody 19th-Century literary style in a way that is readable and yet hilarious at the same time. The magic she describes in her story is effective, ghostly and avoids being trapped in the same Tolkienesque/D&D valley that many authors, including myself, resort to (no lightning bolts and Magic Missiles flying around) (oddly enough, Tolkien's was a relatively low-magic world compared to most of his descendents). And the story, while being set in a fantastical universe full of little mysteries for the reader to unravel (conveniently set aside in little footnotes so well-thought-out they have a poetic quality), never loses sight of its flawed, but sympathetic characters.

Eifelheim, Michael Flynn (re-read, A): More delicious world-building, but the world is our own. One reviewer described the book as making you feel like you could speak German and live in a small 14th century village by the end of it, and I definitely agree. I can't talk about comparisons to Eco's The Name of the Rose (maybe on next year's booklist), but Flynn does a wonderful job of infusing a modern sensibility into the main character while keeping everyone firmly grounded in the correct time period, and then using a science-fiction element to explore the limits and wonders of their belief system. It has a quiet, understated beauty in its themes, but never preaches or prattles, and my Friend Who Will Be A Priest admired its apt handling of classical philosophy and Catholic dogma.

Startide Rising, David Brin (re-read, A-): When I first read this, I couldn't believe that it won both a Hugo and a Nebula, but once you get into it, it's so much fun you stop worrying about whether it stands up with the greats and instead have fun with the sheer amount of crazy ideas and action that Brin throws at you, in a very Heinleinesque fashion. It has talking dolphins! And alien empires! And mysteries! and intrigue! and Action! And while Brin can get a little preachy, it's so much fun even he can't ruin it.

The Uplift War, David Brin (re-read, B): The sequel/sidequel to Startide Rising is very slow-going at first, and doesn't feel like a complete story, more like a setup for the Big Thing Coming Down the Line, but it is also chock-full of fun ideas (still not as many as Startide Rising). The allegorizing of the invading army and their fanaticism gets very thin, though, as does the whole chimp Vichy thing.

Star Wars: Heir to the Empire, Dark Force Rising, The Last Command, Timothy Zahn (re-read, A-, B, B): Timothy Zahn is the Christopher Nolan/Stephen Moffat of space opera: he creates clever, multi-threaded stories that leave emotional development mostly for you to appreciate rather than empathize or feel. Zahn, more than any other writer in the SW Expanded Universe (and I've read most of them) gets the feel of Star Wars right: epic without being portentous, semi-mythological without getting mystical, adventurous while still bearing thematic weight (clones? anyone?). His dialogue sounds like something Harrison/Carrie/Mark would say on-set, and he doesn't try to mix Star Wars' adventure space-opera with other genres.

Other books I may try to tackle if I have time:
Song of Susannah, The Dark Tower, Stephen King
Quicksilver, Neal Stephenson
A Game of Thrones, George R.R. Martin

2011-06-28T11:12:00.000-07:00

On Seeing the Gays

As some of you may know, the governor of New York signed a bill into a law that allows gay people to get married, since New York is the most progressive, forward-thinking, trend-setting state in the Union. It was definitely the first state to allow this (no it wasn't) (it wasn't even second) (that is to say, there were five other states that were more trend-setting than New York was, a fact that seems to conveniently have slipped the minds of LGBTQ advocates all weekend) (in fact, it was beaten to the punch by IOWA, which is a Midwestern state so backwards that they still haven't gotten Duke Nukem Forever) (New York getting beaten at anything by Iowa is like the tortoise beating the hare, if the hare kept talking about how much better his pizza was than everyone else's).

As a consequence, there was a massive Pride Parade in New York City last weekend, where thousands of people took to the streets in fanciful corporate logo'd floats to demonstrate how much they loved being gay/lesbian/bisexual/transgender/queer, and in the case of one group, how much they hate Israel. (There was also a group of "bi-brarians" proudly holding up signs that show where sex and gender studies are located in the Dewey Decimal system.)

I happened to be in NYC for the weekend to visit my friend I-Banker, along with several other old schoolmates. One of them suggested we go to the Pride Parade, "so we can be part of history!" (I mentioned what I said above, that even Iowa already has gay marriage. My friend's response was both sucker-punch-y and optimistic: she said once New York does something, the entire country follows. /facepalm.gif)

So we went to go see the parade. When I went to visit Sam Clam's Disco last summer (a notorious hotspot for LGBTQ culture, although they don't have gay marriage) (seriously guys, if Iowa has it already...), there was a large Pride Parade, which I didn't go to (I apparently missed an impromptu performance by the Backstreet Boys, or maybe N'SYNC).

There were all the requisite stereotypes on display, but there was also a large number of normal/normally-dressed people, just happy to be there. I'm not quite sure I can emulate the feeling of being Proud and Out, but I compare it to going to a convention and knowing that, not only does Han Shoot First, but there are thousands- maybe millions- of others who feel the same way. To be a minority that is so roundly hated, stereotyped, and dismissed has to be crushingly depressing, and lonely. To know that there are others who are like you, that you're part of something you can be Proud of in public...well, I can see why that might be so appealing.

2011-06-18T12:24:00.001-07:00

I'm Going to be a FAMOUS AUTHOR someday, and YOU'LL BE SORRY

I have always had a fascination with books. Even as a child, when I couldn't actually read, I would demand to be read to: my illustrated children's Bible (I carried that tattered thing around until one day in Sunday school the children's pastor told everyone to turn to Matthew something or other, and I realized everyone else had graduated to actual, non-story-based Bibles), the picture books in my Montessouri preschool (so much nature! so many trees! so much sharing!), my mother's handpicked collection of illustrated Korean fairy tales (they were printed in English on one side and Hangul on the other side). Anything and everything.

Reading (and, eventually) writing was shrouded in an almost occult-like mystery for me. I was the last person in my Kindergarten class to learn how to read, a fact that wracked my little 4-year-old self (5-year old self? 6-year old self?) with anxiety. So much anxiety- I would cry and wail (partly to get attention; I love attention, more on this later) because everyone else could read gooder than I could.

And then it happened (which should be written as follows: "IT happened!!!"), which is how I describe it. One day I woke up and could ready pretty much everything- jumping straight from illiteracy to being able to read books, newspapers, magazines, medicine bottle labels, etc. Phonics, diction, and grammar were all internalized. Although I couldn't understand much of the cultural context that went with "adult" fiction (I was always sneaking pages of Tom Clancy here and there), I didn't have any trouble actually reading it, and picked up vocabulary rapidly. I'm sure there was a bit of a learning curve, but all I remember is one day not being able to read and the next day reading everything in the school library.

I describe reading and writing as being innate talents for me. Paradoxically, I had a really hard time in freshman English composition in high school, because I already knew how to read and write with perfect grammar; I just didn't know what the names for any of the parts of speech, or how to diagram a sentence- tools that English teachers used to teach students for whom English construction didn't come naturally. It came with reading lots and lots and lots of books all throughout elementary school (my ability to absorb information very quickly came in handy here). I was like an incredibly sophisticated Support Vector Machine learning tool- feed me context, I'll spit out rules.

But it felt natural to me. It felt easy, unlike math, which required me to practice and practice and practice, while my friends seemed to understand and absorb new concepts instantly; or sports, where I could envision the body movements needed to do things perfectly, but never twist my body to match my mind's eye; or, heaven forbid, foreign languages, which I basically gave up on. When I was taught to diagram sentences or to write complex-deductive paragraphs or use the five-paragraph essay format, it felt clunky, like being given a bunch of mountain-climbing ropes and spikes when you've been free-climbing for years with no problems.

Meanwhile, despite the attempts of years of Asian family peer pressure and Montessouri education trying to squash my competitive, selfish, attention-hungry nature, one little element of my life managed to survive the "everyone's a winner"/"we're all special in different ways"/"the nail that stands out gets hammered down" brainwash-and-purge societal conditioning of my life. That was, of course, writing. I wanted to write when I was young, making weird retellings of the media that consumed my attention- Moby Dick, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, the Hardy Boys novels (and about six of the Nancy Drew ones, purchased by my loving grandmother), Star Wars, the ten minutes of Hunt for Red October my parents allowed me to watch, and others.

I kept writing, off and on, mostly attempts to quash new ideas and characters into this mega-long story about gun-totin' mercenaries and secret agents and aliens and undersea battles and space races and explosions and cyborgs and submarines and stuff that I kept adding on to. In 8th grade I came up with about five different story ideas (that have stuck with me; I'm working on turning one of them into a novel right now).

But in addition to wanting to write things, to have created things, I also wanted to be a writer. I wanted- and still want- to be the star, a little celebrity, to see interviews and QA with my responses popping up on the Internet, to see people quote chunks of my work and claim I stole this idea or inspired that one. I want to see my work on the New and Bestseller shelves at Barnes and Noble. I want to call myself an Author. I love the attention. I want it. In writing, I want to be the star.

I've seen and heard different authors talk, and been privileged to meet a number of them (briefly). The ones I can remember off the top of my head:

-My middle school brought in a lady (can't remember her name) who had written a biography of Aun Sung Suu Kyi, a lady none of us had ever heard of (the next time I heard of her, it was ten years later and she had been released from house arrest and my girlfriend's friend wanted to drink victory shots in celebration). She also had written a biography of the Dalai Lama. I remember her mostly because our principal asked us to do something called "waving wheat", which is a tradition at her home school of the University of Kansas. Also, she told us a story about how the Dalai Lama had been kind of a jerk when he was kid- he would make his bodyguards pretend to be soldiers and then "sneak up and attack them" in the nighttime, pretending to be a ninja or whatnot. This moved him slightly ahead of Pope John Paul in the heads-of-church rankings in my head.

-They also brought in Jack Gantos, who was a great speaker; he walked us through the process of creating a story based on your own life (he used an anecdote about his mother firing a gun and thinking she had killed someone which was very funny and unfortunately I cannot reconstruct). He was witty, engaging, and made the writing process very relatable. Mr. Gantos wrote a book called Joey Pizga Swallowed the Key, which unfortunately I never ended up looking up despite promising to do so.

-I also saw Clive Gifford, from whom I bought a book called Learn How to Juggle, which promised to teach even klutzes to juggle. Unfortunately, I never did.

-I had an opportunity to see Orson Scott Card, author of Ender's Game (which had recently become one of my favorite novels) speak. He didn't read anything from his novels, but he did speak for a while about a number of salient topics: censorship, book sales, how to get started as a writer, and a lot of hilarious stories about life in general. I became a fan of his off-the-wall reviews which he still writes at his website.

-In college, I missed the opportunity to see Salman Rushdie speak at an event, and William Gibson speak at another. *retroactive facepalm*

I think to be a good writer you have to have a little egotism. Let me show you a list of famously self-centered jerks, with the names removed to protect the innocent:

-Writer A had a ticket on a convoy ship to Europe during WWII. Writer A's wife had a plane ticket (significantly safer; U-boats have difficulty shooting down planes at this point in time). Writer A forces his wife to take the convoy ship while he takes the plane.

-Writer B wrote back to an 11-year-old's fanmail with a note that said, "yeah yeah, i'm the greatest, quit wasting my time with stupid questions"

-Writer C is the only person in the history of the developed world to wear an eyepatch and yet not be a cool person.

-Writer D was famous for saying, "If you don't have something nice to say about someone, come sit by me"

Guess who they are? Yep! You're right: Ernst Hemingway, Isaac Asimov, James Joyce, and Truman Capote, and they were total douchebags to everyone (this is a totally logical argument, bear with me). (No it's not).

As a writer, part of my bulging ego is that when I read stuff, I criticize. I think I can do it better. I **know** I can do it better, or so I think. Ender's Game? Too much convenient mysticism. King Lear? The characters jerk around so much that I half-expect to see "Script by George Lucas" at the end of it. All the King's Men? They misspelled the governor's name; it should be "H-U-E-Y L-O-N-G". As I Lay Dying? The ending isn't milked for full comedic potential. Dune? Egads, man, lay off the acid for a minute.

(There are a few exceptions to this: there is no way I'll ever write something as beautifully interconnected and multi-layered, and also as entertaining, as Cryptonomicon, and I have a hard time believing I could write something as grounded in emotional suffering as Toni Morrison or Wuthering Heights)

Arrogance can help drive you to create great work, but I think the thing that is currently missing from the Author's toolbelt is the grit to back it up. In fact, because I do have some natural gift, I've been able to coast and haven't worked hard enough to be able to develop certain useful skills. And more dangerously, because of my ego, I think it should be easy.

Writing is not, in any way, "easy". It is work. Hemingway didn't just spend all day being a huge jerk to everyone (he once said of Faulkner: "Does he think he can make people feel big emotions by using big words?"), he would first get naked and tie his leg to a chair until he had written a certain number words, and then he would be a huge jerk to everyone. Kristine Kathryn Rusch writes quite eloquently about it here. (not about naked Hemingway; about discipline). Even the most talentless pop star puts in thousands of hours at the gym and several hours learning about music before being able to swim in cash and reality TV show offers; why should writing be any different?

Someday, I hope I can develop the work ethic to be a "real" writer. In the meantime, I'm going to be like that pickup legend who could have made it to the big leagues if he played organized. And also on the Internet.

2011-03-31T23:11:00.000-07:00

Lost and Found

While trying to dig up some old demographic information, I stumbled across an archived email in my Gmail account that was a forward from another Gmail account...which had the handle of a fictional megacorporation I imagined in a story I wrote when I was in 10th grade. Yet I had only ever owned a single Gmail account, and this wasn't it. I had literally no recollection of this email account.

To find out what was in this account that I had forgotten about was driving me forward, the way that a music historian might be driven forward to find out more about a lost Mozart symphony if he found a scrap of sheet music (in Mozart's handwriting) that started with a suspiciously familiar sequence of notes...

I had an eerie sense of deja vu as I attempted to recover the password for this account and see what it contained- the security question was one that also pertained to that story, and I could not for the life of me outguess the (presumably) 10th grade version of the Author.

Finally, I had it send a recovery link to another one of my old accounts, which I thankfully *could* remember the password to, and I opened up this mystery Gmail account to reveal...

That it was a private account set entirely aside to house my correspondence with my best friend from 8th grade. I actually laughed out loud. It was brilliant. And it got better when I started actually reading those emails.

If I have time and a cruel inclination, I might post some of the emails I sent from that account, which are so hilariously emo and bizarre that they don't seem painful anymore. Time will do that to you, I guess.

2011-01-30T22:39:00.001-08:00

Ahh, Catty Disses

h/t to Everydayshouldbesaturday.com. You can't really pick a favorite one, but this one is pretty baller:
"
[My grandfather] and his brother were at a dance, and his brother went up and asked a girl to dance. She said, “No thanks, I’m very particular about who I dance with.” He immediately replied, “I’m not, that’s why I asked you.”
"

2010-12-07T09:43:00.000-08:00

"Good Friends" and "Great Friends"

-A good friend will give you a ride to the airport. A great friend will give you a ride back, too.

-A good friend will always be your wingman. A great friend will tell you you don't need one.

-A good friend will take you aside and quietly tell you that you're embarrassing yourself on the dance floor. A great friend will be embarrassing his/herself out there with you.

-A good friend will put on the Robin costume for Halloween when you're Batman. A great friend will put on the Azrael costume for Halloween when you're Batman.

-A good friend will give you notes from lecture. A great friend skipped class with you.

-A good friend will post on your Facebook wall. A great friend will post on your actual wall.

-A good friend will tell you you're sexy because of your intellect. A great friend will tell you you're sexy because of your body.

-A good friend asks your advice about who to date. A great friend dates everyone you've dated, just to be sure.

-A good friend introduces you to music by great bands. A great friend introduces you to great bands.

-A good friend stabs you in the front. A great friend doesn't.

-A good friend will meet you for coffee. A great friend will get you all the coffee. In the world.

-A good friend will let you borrow their DVDs. A great friend will explain to you what BitTorrent is.

-A good friend will let you join the GDI. A great friend will let you join Nod.

-A good friend will tell you when it's raining. A great friend will make it rain for you.

-A good friend will give you their last Four Loko. A great friend will drink their last Four Loko, because it's terrible.

-A good friend will serenade you from under your balcony. A great friend will have someone who's actually good at singing serenade you from under your balcony.

-A good friend will give the speech at your wedding. A great friend will just fill everyone's glasses again.

-A good friend will take you to Disney Land. A great friend will take you to Disney World.

-A good friend has many other good friends. A great friend has no other friends but you.

-A good friend will walk one extra mile with you. A great friend will walk 1.6...kilometers.

-A good friend will shoot himself in the head so you don't have to watch him being eaten by the zombies. A great friend will shoot you in the head so you don't have to be eaten by the zombies.

2010-11-23T11:27:00.000-08:00

For Women Everywhere

After some unfortunate incidents regarding the treatment and objectification of women on campus at some of America's great universities, I decided to try to put together something that might help women to strike back. A rallying call, if you will, using the power of film to create a movement that will help them strike back.

EXT. Courtyard- DAY

Camera pan over a blue and white SIGN that says "Campus Women's Center". It's a cold, gray winter morning, and standing there under the sign is the FLY GIRL, a haughty-looking dark-haired girl who steps forward-

FLY GIRL

Ten hut! Eyes FORWARD!

There's an explosive PAH of condensation from the breath of LIEUTENANT ALICE RAIN. She is a hillbilly from the mountains of West Virginia, and has one defining physical characteristic: a long SCAR running down her neck, as if she made a mistake shotgunning a beer once. This scar will never once be mentioned.

LT. ALICE
My name is Lt. Alice Rain, and I'm putting together a special team. And I need eight soldiers. Eight...Shrew-ish....Amer-ican sold-iers.

Pan across the legs of eight SORORITY WOMEN, all stepping forward in synchronized motion, their identical UGG BOOTS scuffing the pavement. They are all dressed identically in LEGGINGS, MINISKIRTS, DESIGNER SCARVES, and NORTH FACE JACKETS/PULLOVERS.

LT. ALICE
Now, y'all might'a heard rumors about an Armadillo Grill run happenin' soon. Well, we'll be leavin' a little earlier. We're going to be droppin' onto campus, dressed as sorority sisters. And once we're in enemy territory, as a bush-thwacking, guerilla army, we're goin' to be doin' one thing and one thing only: p0wn'n frat bros.

Pan across the Gucci, Tory Burch, and Louis Vuitton HANDBAGS the sorority women are carrying.

LT. ALICE
Members of the Inter-Fraternity Council have conquered this campus through intimidation, rohypnol, and flagrantly sexist social norms. And that's exactly what we're gonna do to them. Now I don't know about y'all, but I didn't come down from the underdiversified commodity economy of the Appalachian mountains, buy Halloween costumes designed to snugly fit a 12-year-old girl, and fight my way through the postmodern social networking of PanHel rush to teach frat bros lessons in humanity. Frat bro's ain't got no humanity. They're the foot soldiers of white male heterosexual privilege. That's why each and every son-of-a-Michigan-fan we find wearin' a popped collar, they're gonna die.

Fly Girl smirks in slow motion.

LT. ALICE
We will be cruel to the frat stars, and through our cruelty, they will know who we are. They will find the evidence of our cruelty, in the disembowed, dismembered, and disfigured bodies of their brothers we leave behind us. And the frats will not be able to help themselves from imagining the cruelty their brothers endured at our hands, and our stiletto heels, and the edge of Juicy Campus and CollegeABC. And they will be sickened by us. And they will talk about us. And And when the Broseph's close their eyes at night, and their sub conscious tortures them for the evil they've done, it will be with thoughts of us, that it tortures them with. (beat) Sound good?

All of the Sorority Women step forward.

SORORITY WOMEN
Yes Ma'am!

LT. ALICE
I got a word of warning for all you would-be feminists. When you join my command, you take on debit. A debit you owe me, personally. Every woman under my command, owes me, one hundred Natty light tabs. (beat) And I want my tabs.

TITLE CARD: Quentin Tarantino presents: INGLOURIOUS BEETCHES

2010-11-22T14:01:00.000-08:00

Because We Can't Get Enough Ricky Stanzi

First, if you haven't seen Ricky Stanzi, quarterback of the Iowa Hawkeyes, declare his love for America, please follow this link and watch the video of him proclaiming "USA Number 1" after winning the Orange Bowl in 2010.

Second, Ricky has a problem with the communists who live in Iowa City:

There is a possibility that Ricky Stanzi may have sat in on a class with a communist. Yes, the American quarterback, the "Love it or leave it, USA No. 1" quarterback, might have shared class space with a Marxist, socialist or communist. We are talking Iowa City and the University of Iowa.
"I don't know how other colleges are, but when you walk around here, you've got people ... you’ve got guys walking around in dresses and just these hippies," Stanzi said. "They're doing nothing. There's the Ped Mall area down there, right in the middle. Those people are going nowhere. Those people are the people who don't like America.
"They always find something wrong with [America]. They're the problem. They're the people who need to change and figure it out. They need to get it together and work hard."
(h/t: Dr. Saturday via OurHonorDefend)

2010-09-30T16:32:00.001-07:00

Ahh, Jocks

From a message board I frequent:

"
1961, Freshman year and I'm taking my meals in the cafeteria for Park and Baker Halls. A large folding door closes off one room and it turns out to be the sitting area set aside for the football team and those guys are not on the same meal plan. They go through a separate line and emerge with porterhouse steaks or slabs of rib roast that cover the plate, foil wrapped baked potatoes the size of your Chipotle, salad bowls that look like your mom's mixing bowl and then they disappear into the closed off room.

Once they're seated the noise (which consists of shouts, belches and boisterous laughter) from this room drowns out the chatter in our section of the dining hall.

This goes on through most of the season and then one night before the Wisconsin game I'm sitting there eating my roast beef in gravy along with five or six fellow pencil necked freshman geeks (not Greeks) when suddenly, inexplicably, the noise from the secret room stops, an eerie silence falls about the place and holds. One of my friends then shouts, "More wine for Polyphemous!" and the rest of us burst out laughing like it's the world's funniest joke (see Python, Monty, Worlds Funniest Joke Sketch).

From out of the still quiet, secret room emerges a scowling figure. He looks as if boulders had been stuffed inside his clothes, his neck is so thick that the bottoms of his ears are about an inch further out than the tops, his jaw looks like the bow of a battleship -- it's Iron Mike Ingram, nose tackle and baddest sonuvabitch on a team full of bad sonuvabitches. He steams right over to our table, "All right which one of you smart ass wise guys said that?"

We give up our comrade in the blink of an eye and Iron Mike fixes him with a steel cutting laser look, "I read that book too. That ain't funny." And then turns and stomps his way back into the athlete's cave.

The rest of us didn't breath for a minute or so and then very quietly took our trays back to the wash room and slipped away before Iron Mike and his buddies emerged.
"

2010-09-06T20:07:00.000-07:00

Pro Tip Regarding Postmodern Texts

They're much easier to read as new media (i.e. in electronic form). The absurdism which characterizes much of postmodern writing can be better dealt with that way. Just zoom in so the text is cartoonishly large, and suddenly you realize how unimportant it is.

2010-08-31T18:12:00.001-07:00

How The Author Explains Some "Complex" Concepts

Postmodernism: I've heard of it, but I can't tell you what it is

Postmodernism (true version): I've heard of it, but it's meaningless

Absurdism: It doesn't make sense

Surrealism: Fish

Apathy: Who cares?

Recursion: See "Recursion"

Tautology: It's a tautology.

2010-08-27T18:22:00.000-07:00

Why I Put Up With Slate.com's Commenters:

" A while back I remember listening to the Pussycat Dolls singing "Don't you wish your girlfriend was hot like me" and thinking that mine's pretty hot... AND she knows enough English to use the subjunctive mood when discussing what the singer vainly believes to be a counterfactual proposition. "

2010-08-14T18:09:00.000-07:00

I Left My Harp in Sam Clam's Disco #6: In Which the Author Discovers that Instead of Writing Clever Content, You Can Just Make References to Someone Else's

Night on the harbor bay is clear, crisp, and cold, and if I was home in the Midwest, it'd be about October right around now, and I'd be writing about how the leaves are changing colors, as if the trees are blushing, and if you strain your ears, you can just barely hear the whistle of footballs arcing through the air and corn-fed farm boys getting dissatisfied with the patriarchal consumerist suburban lifestyle and going to "find themselves" out in the wilderness. But instead, it's July, I'm writing about how the reflected lights of the skyline glow against the absolute black void of the water and if you strain your ears, you can just barely hear the screams of gamblers tossing down plastic chips onto faux-velvet covers and a DJ who actually isn't terrible at his job.

Beneath my feet, I can feel the engines stir as they strain to move a ferry roughly the size of Manhattan across the bay, turning towards the city. The twinkling lights that outline the glassy skyline seem false, too clear, too small, like flickering windows of a miniature house sitting next to a model train diorama. I grim the deck handrail and look out over the seas, and if I didn't know better, I would say the skyline and the water are rotating around a motionless ferry, as though they're on a giant disc sitting on top of the back of a slowly turning turtle. The boat is the only thing staying still as the whole universe shifts and changes around it. Carefully, I remove a top from my pocket and set it spinning on the deck to test my hypothesis that the boat is standing still/that this is all a dream. It spins and wobbles, spins and wobbles. If I close my eyes, the whole world drops away-

"Hey, Captains Courageous, you coming?"

I turn to see one of my fellow interns standing there, with an eyepatch over his left eye and a dark mid-level beer in his hand.

I shrug. "Sure, why not."

The ferry boat is loaded with close to a thousand [Company Name Redacted] interns of all shapes and sizes, many wearing pirate-themed gear: eyepatches, fake wooden legs, hooks for hands, cutlasses, RPGs, Pittsburgh hats, Barbary Coast patches, squidlike Cthulhu masks, and even a BitTorrent shirt or two. There are three levels to the boat: Shame, where interns may attempt to sing along with popular music piped in over an intercom, Despair, where interns may attempt to dance with popular music piped in by a DJ, and Karma, where interns may attempt to gamble away fake money at an array of three different games, including game[0] (aka blackjack), game[1] (aka roulette) and game[2] (aka craps)*.

I try to get in line for karaoke at Shame, but then one of my fellow interns sings an impossibly good rendition of Bill Withers' "Aint No Sunshine When She's Gone", and I realized that there's no way I'm ever going to be able to replicate her smooth tone and on-key quality. So I head upstairs to Despair, where there's an open bar that only serves beer and wine free (but high-quality of both) and I debate the merits of a $10 shot. I notice that a number of the interns (by which I mean, all of them) are standing around in an enormous circle, whose probability of spontaneous existence is rather low. After all, because of the bizarre confluence of interns, alcohol, managers, and pirate gear, everyone is slightly tenser than they might be at a club, so there's considerably less grinding than you might expect, and everyone is making non-trivial effort to pretend they've stayed within a two-drink limit. Dance circles form quickly and dissolve just as quickly, fractal and ephemeral, so for one to exist for a long period of time at that size is incomparably improbable.

I crane my neck over several variably dressed interns, to see a very senior executive of [Company Name Redacted] breaking it down in full pirate regalia.

Somewhere on the deck outside, the top keeps spinning. I think.

*To quote a fellow intern: "Craps is a really fun game to play once you realize you'll never understand it and you basically can't win."

2010-08-05T21:56:00.000-07:00

Inception

I will have much more to write about Inception, which is kind of like the Phillip Glass of movies: highly structured, fractally simplistic but incredibly dense, and not as weird as you think it is when you first hear it (foghorns, that is). Anyways, here is the review of the film I like the best, and here is quite possibly the best trailer for it (cut by a fan, of course)

Ta da:

2010-07-26T20:39:00.000-07:00

I Left My Harp in Sam Clam's Disco #5: In Which the Author Discusses the Problems with Keratin Formation in Hygroscopic Environments

My hair is difficult to cut. Finding someone who can cut my hair is an even more onerous task, so imagine my delight and surprise when I discover that around the corner from my current place of residence is a hair salon (I prefer to think of it as a more masculine "barber shop"). There are several good signs about this place:

1) It isn't titled something hipster-ish like "Hair Design by Takeda", or cutesy, like "Lock, Stock, and 2 Smoking Clippers"; instead, it has a very blunt, Times-New-Roman-type sign that says "Hair Cut and Style" and screams "no ad budget"

2) There are plastic sticky letters above the displays that say something like "MEN'S HAIRCUT $10"

3) Most importantly, you can hear a very musical type of foreign language coming from the inside, which means that the people working there are either from Southeast Asia, or Scottish, all of which are good signs.

I go inside and find, to my delight, that the lady who will be cutting my hair today is in fact, Vietnamese ***WARNING RACISM ALERT*** because, there are only a few people who can cut my hair in a way that doesn't make it look like, say, a diorama of the French Revolution as created by a hedgehog with a surrealist bent, or Spock. These people are, in order of proficiency: 1) the Vietnamese 2) the "fish eaters" that That Girl used to make fun of ("unlike them, *our food* has flavor") and 3) a Korean lady who moved to Chicago. ***WARNING END RACISM ALERT***.

It turns out alright; in fact, once I get over the fact that my sideburns are now shaped like the State of Texas (my skin is oily enough to stand in for the Gulf) , I'm quite pleased with my haircut. Moral of the story: be racist; it's good for your hair.

2010-07-25T13:12:00.001-07:00

Interlude: The Joy of Legacy Gaming

I am the owner of a Macbook, and this makes gaming rather difficult. My deathly fear of partitioning hard drives has kept me from using Boot Camp to fully utilize the blazingly-fast (by 2007 standards) components inside my computer, so I use a handy-dandy piece of software called VMware to run various virtual machines: Windows 98SE, Windows XP SP2, and Linux-Ubuntu*.

In selecting games that can run in a virtualized environment, I take myself back to the mindset I had in the mid-to-late '90s. When we bought our first family PC, it was a state-of-the-art Gateway rig (costing ~$5,000 MSRP) that had 16 MB of RAM, 200 MB of hard-drive space, and a blazingly-fast 166 Mhz Pentium chip. Unfortunately, it did not have a 3D graphics accelerator, and so I was unable to play MechWarrior 2: Mercenaries, a game that I had played and fallen in love with at my cousin's house (he was clearly ahead of the curve). I still have fond memories of that computer, though, starting with the first three computer games my father bought at a store: Men In Black: the Game, F-22 Lightning II, and a little weird-looking thing called Fallout.

It is absolutely astonishing to me how many classic games came through our greedy little fingers when my brother and I were children: in addition to the original Fallout, my brother and I played Command & Conquer (and practically cried with joy when my dad brought home Red Alert), Jane's AH-64D Longbow, Total Annihilation, Diablo (until my parents decided it was too bloody), Warcraft II, Dark Reign (does anyone remember Dark Reign?), the original Age of Empires, Quake II, Civilization II, Rainbow 6, Jedi Knight...the list goes on and on.

After a few years, my Papa had been convinced through carefully thought-out lobbying attempts by myself and my little brother (mostly us crying and saying "We can't play this game!"), and upgraded to a Pentium II 300 Mhz CPU, which was to the original Pentium as Terminator 2 was to the original Terminator, along with 64 MB of RAM, a 3dfx Voodoo 2 graphics accelerator and (this was the kicker) an enormous, 400-MB (that's FOUR HUNDRED MEGABYTES) hard drive.

I still remember staring at it the day after and watching this newfangled game called Half-Life run smoothly and beautifully; it was the most exciting 15-minute-long train ride of my life. There are very few things in my life that will ever match that beautiful feeling. Ahem.

In any case, here are some of the games I've been playing:

-Heroes of Might and Magic III (circa 1999)
-Jagged Alliance 2 (1999)
-Starcraft (circa 1998, and this will require its own blog post)
-Homeworld (circa 1998, picked up from that beautiful used-book store down the road for $7.95, and just as revolutionary as it was when it was released)
-Diablo II (1999)

*all the hipsters still sneer at me when I tell them I like Ubuntu

2010-07-24T22:01:00.000-07:00

I Left My Harp in Sam Clam's Disco #4: In Which the Author Tastes the Fruit of the Farmer's Market of Good and Evil

My papa always told me that when he retired from [Other Company Name Redacted] he would want to go and get two more jobs: as a people greeter at Wal-Mart during the week, and a chef at one of those teppanyaki-type places on the weekends. I've never understood why my father, who has actual talents and hobbies, would ever want to do menial jobs like that, until I was enlightened by something that [Company Name Redacted] calls the Culinary Internship.

This is an opportunity to do several things, first and foremost of which is the opportunity to skip work for a half-day, giving me an easy out of a meeting via [secret and proprietary long-distance communication system that rhymes with "Mideo Bonferencing" redacted]. But more importantly, it's an opportunity to spend a half-day working in the kitchen of one of our cafeterias (which serves free food), learning about the food prep process. This is how I end up on donut-frying duty at 8 am, dressed in a comically stereotypical white chef's jacket and CSI-yellow latex gloves.

Frying donuts is a surprisingly difficult endeavour, and it's nothing like what you've experienced before. It involves donut dough, which is like cookie dough, but for donuts, and an enormous fat fryer that's large enough to be used to dunk naughty children in. Using a donut scoop, which is like an ice-cream scoop, but for donuts, I take globs of dough the size of my fist and plop them into the oil bath, which hisses appreciatively in a disturbingly anthropomorphic way, like an evil version of one of the magically alive kitchen instruments from Beauty & the Beast*.

Then begins the real issue. When heated, the globs of donut dough expand and start to float in the oil like corpses, but they're actually donuts, and that means that one part- the long segment that sticks out when floating- is not coated with oil, which means it might not get cooked properly. The only possible recourse, therefore, is to use a pair of tongs to savagely beat them down whenever they poke their heads out, bopping them down whenever they pop up like Whack-a-Mole, except with donuts.

It's fun, it helps people get the goodies they want, and it involves donuts; this is enough to keep me amused for what seems like hours, until breakfast is over and the crew cleans up, and serves themselves some leftover bacon, eggs, etc., though for some reason nobody wants to eat my donuts. Afterwards, we gather 'round and get assigned to different stations as we prepare for lunch.

Each team member prepares some dish for the buffet and presents it to the head chef and his assistant, who go down the line, sampling and occasionally interrogating the cooks as to the exact ingredients that go into, say, soy vegan hot dogs wrapped in noodles with coconut sauce. Each chef is required to be able to rattle off the recipe from memory to the head chef, and also to swallow a cyanide capsule if captured by the enemy and tortured for the secret recipe for grilled cheese ([ingredient redacted] between [ingredient redacted], if you're wondering).

The head chef and his assistant seem to like most of the selections today, other than offering a few subtle tweaks here and there that go off-recipe (they both follow the Half-Blood Prince's philosophy when it comes to cooking stuff). We then scurry around and get ready for the day's meal, which in my case involves chopping up a crate full of broccoli for the stir-fry station ("If you run out of broccoli, nobody wants to eat stir fry for some reason").

Next to another team member named Mauricio (it takes me an embarassingly long time to realize this is a Spanglification of "Maurice"), I chop vegetables in a mechanical way and try to re-energize my Spanish with him and other passerby. I manage to learn a few things: most of his family is in NorCal, he has two kids who like watching soccer, and if he ran the cafeteria he would serve grilled shrimp and fish, with various tomato and pepper-based sauces over brown rice.

It's pleasant, to have a conversation that has nothing to do with what you're working on, and I reflect that I could do this job, and be moderately happy. What does that say about me?

I also resolve to talk to my team back at [office name redacted] more about personal, non-work-related content.

*there's a deep-fryer among the characters there, right? You know, the one with the deep Southern accent who sprays Gustan with his gurgling peanut oil during the defense of the castle and then turns into a fat, mayonnaise-loving caricature of Bill Clinton at the end, in a pointed and subtle critique by the Disney animators of how he embarrassed his own party and Americans everywhere? Right? Am I the only one who remembers this?