Eat Your Books

What I've Been Doing

2011-10-23T22:02:00.000-07:00

Image by Clio Chiang.

These days, I've been writing a bit for The New England Theater Geek, a blog of local Boston theater reviews. It's the city where I just moved and a lovely way of getting to know the community.

I'm also continuing to contribute to The Analytical Couch Potato, where I've most recently begun blathering about Doctor Who.

I'm reading about as much as I always do but don't have much to say about the material. Ah well.

Recent recommendations include, but are not limited to:

• Swordspoint by Ellen Kushner

• Fox Woman and Fudoki by Kij Johnson

And recent issues of:

• Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet

• Fantasy and Science Fiction Magazine

• Asimov's

So go read all this.

One Week After Clarion

2011-08-14T20:44:00.001-07:00

Photos courtesy of Snazel!

I'm still trying to process everything that happened at Clarion. It was a happy experience, a stressful experience, and something that I think has given me a lot of perspective.

Comic-Con was an adventure. Due to the generosity of one of my Clarion fellows, I was able to be there not just for one day but THREE.

I spent Friday afternoon in the dealers room while Saturday and Sunday were mainly used for panels, like the Voice Actor Q&A, The Last Airbender: Legend of Korra, and Doctor Who. All three had magnificently long lines. Perhaps much more wisely, other Clarionauts spent time in the YA and literature panels.

I had a lot of fun scoping out the publishing section of the dealers room. I preferred the booths involving indie comics and fiction to the ones in the more commercial part of the convention center where all the TV channels and movies were handing out promotional material. The crowds were particularly dense down there!

Hope I can make it to Comic-Con again in the future!

The last two weeks of Clarion involved particularly close and enlightening sessions with Kij Johnson and John Kessel. Excellent writers and wonderful teachers with different strengths that lent depth and credibility to their lectures. Saying much more would force me to gush. Suffice to say, I would be very sad if I never met them again.

Workshops in the last couple weeks became particularly eloquent and fun. You could tell everyone had gotten to know each others' writing styles and tics. Kim Stanley Robinson stopped by and said he was impressed.

It was nice to feed off of such supportive energy from everyone.

It may be a while before I gain enough distance from Clarion to discuss it objectively. Explaining it to friends and family here at home has been hard, but they've been patient. They know I've done something enormous and that it's going to lead to great things.

Though perhaps it already has.

Clarion Notes: Day 24 (Wings)

2011-07-20T13:52:00.000-07:00

Sanity Status of the Troupes: Holding. It's definitely a pressure cooker here considering the turnaround time of the work we do and the vulnerability of individual students in workshops.

Elizabeth Bear commented on the fact that we're a pretty emotionally stable group and that we seem to "have each others backs." It certainly feels like it's true. I hope we continue to support each other in writing endeavors after this session of Clarion has ended. Just yesterday, I was talking to another student about keeping the Clarion 2011 blog going in order to keep tabs on everybody and trade prompts.

Bear also said she thinks the future of the genre, based on our stories, looks pretty good. I hope she's right about that, too.

Workshops: This week's instructor, David Anthony Durham, is an interesting contrast with the previous three teachers in that he started with historical fiction, moved into writing fantasy, and is in the process of returning to historical. He's a remarkably patient presence in workshops and very reserved. He seems to take the in-jokes shared by the others in stride.

Today, he spoke about the research that goes into both historical and high fantasy fiction, the choice of fidelity to research, and the importance of viewpoint characters that allow the reader to access what's going on.

The reading at Mysterious Galaxy Bookstore happened on Tuesday night instead of Wednesday. Durham read from a section he did for Fort Freak, the newest addition to George R. R. Martin's Wild Cards anthologies. He then read a couple teasers from his upcoming book The Sacred Band, the last in his high fantasy Acacia series. The crowd at the bookstore was a nice size and I enjoyed the question/answer session afterward.

This weekend: SAN DIEGO COMIC-CON 2011! Clarion has given its participants free passes and YES YES YES YES YES YES.

Clarion Notes: Day 17 (Descent into Madness)

2011-07-13T17:35:00.000-07:00

Sanity Status of the Troupes: One of our number started meowing in class, today. It didn't seem particularly weird. The in-jokes now involve lumberjacks, the word "hard," and collectively saying, "Errrr" in displeasure when something goes wrong.

Currently, the common room has a list of "possible titles" for a choose-your-own-adventure story on the wall and a drawing of the sprinkle lord.

In my phone call to my mom, today, I'm shocked I sounded normal.

Workshops: Elizabeth Bear has proven to be an interesting combination of Nina and Scalzi. Like Nina, she concentrates on the art of narrative; like Scalzi, her approach to teaching is pragmatic.

After workshopping four stories on Monday, she delivered an interesting lecture on different forms of narrative, ranging from the 5-act Elizabethan structure to the epic/soap opera plot style. Her take on want vs. need (main character) and the try-fail cycle was fascinating. It culminated in the class brainstorming two movies in ten minutes based on her outlines.

Tuesday's lesson involved the strengths and weaknesses of different points of view in narrative (ex. omniscient vs. limited third). Also, writers are allowed one amnesia story per career. Unofficial rule.

Today's lecture was mainly a discussion about first lines/hooks, what works, what doesn't, and favorite books and their openings.

The reading at Mysterious Galaxy Bookstore was lovely, this evening.

Bear read us an excellent Californian vampire story from an upcoming Ellen Datlow collection. I think the piece may have been more about Californians than vampires, but that may just be me and my home fried biases.

I'm afraid, due to the little sleep I've been getting lately, I ended up a bit loopy tonight. (Hence the title.) Am currently drinking chamomile before I begin critiquing tonight's stories.

Clarion Notes: Day 13

2011-07-09T23:07:00.000-07:00

The Clarion Schedule, according to Becky Adams, as decided last night:

Week 3: Awkward

Week 4: Wings

Week 5: Permanent Night

Week 6: Rain of Marshallows

All very accurate.

Today: Beach, hurrah! Also more writing.

Elizabeth Bear and her guitar showed up this evening. She popped by the common room to talk and play us some very nice songs with ukulele accompaniment. It was great.

Clarion Notes: Day 11

2011-07-07T15:25:00.000-07:00

Workshops: We've been plowing through each other's stories. Reading parties erupt in the common room each night and sometimes in the living rooms of other apartments.

Right now, there's a ukulele and didgeridoo party in here, pictured left.

After each workshop, we've had a lecture from Scalzi. He tends to focus on the business and marketing aspect of writing which, for selling fiction, is pretty damn important. It's definitely a change from Nina; I'm glad Clarion varies its instructors.

Tuesday's lecture was dedicated to money (ex. budgeting, choosing whether or not to keep one's day job, etc.), Wednesday's involved finding agents and avoiding scams, and today's was all about networking or, as it should more reasonably be called, successfully socializing with peers and people you want to be your peers.

I gather most of these lectures are touched on in his blog. Here's a photo of him with three of our number, Jim W., Andy, and Tim.

In my one-on-one meeting, I asked about maintaining a job while writing and about finding an agent with a novella I wrote in college. The conversation generated a lot of interesting notes. It eventually wandered into a discussion about the excellent idea of landing spouses with superior money management skills. Or, you know, marrying (or divorcing) rich. John Scalzi: a man of wisdom.

I also had a meeting today with the Clarion program director, Shelley Streeby, with whom I shared a trunk story I wrote before coming to California. Hopefully, I'll have time later this week to edit it and the other stories I've turned in so far. She's a great source for critique. Very precise and easy to talk to.

Time feels very, very short.

Clarion Notes: Day 8

2011-07-04T21:32:00.000-07:00

Last Week's Workshops: Nina's Wednesday workshop involved an excellent exercise utilizing setting. We wrote about the memories of our living rooms when we were 10-years old. Afterward, and proving to be much more of a challenge, we wrote about the same room from each of our mothers point-of-views. Fairly difficult, but rewarding.

Thursday and Friday involved a great deal of workshopping fiction. I think we had five stories to read for each day.

Friday afternoon, though, after class was over, we did an hour-long exercise that involved outlining a novel. I initially tried to do a novel idea I've been having for a while that switches between four different main characters, but this turned out to be pretty difficult given the time constraints.

I've saved all the handouts and exercises for after the workshop when, hopefully, I'll have More Time. People refer to this mythical More Time a lot. It feels like it's been longer than a week since Clarion began, but it's still going to be far too short, which is very unfortunate.

The Wednesday Reading at Mysterious Galaxy Bookstore by Nina Kiriki Hoffman was great. Our instructor for the first week, and honestly one of the most encouraging writing teacher's I've had, read a short comedy-horror piece involving airports and flavored emotions.
Afterward, she took questions from the audience; when they ran out, she began to ask them things (one audience member turned out to own a hawk).

The bookstore itself is lovely and full of all the new (and old) releases I've been dying to read but can't possibly fit into my suitcase all at once.

On Saturday evening, we said goodbye to Nina with cards and cookies. She seemed to like that.

The Weekend: THE BEACH. Gorgeous weather, fantastic carpool volunteers, but the Pacific was rough and full of seaweed. I swallowed a lot of salt water came back with most of the beach in my bathing suit. I loved it, but wow, I couldn't get out of bed Sunday, I was so tired!

Today's Workshop ended the Nina Kiriki Hoffman Era and marks the advent of this week's instructor, John Scalzi. We dove right into Monday's critiques. Afterward, we had a discussion on the use of electronic publishing and the current state of the industry. Scalzi has a very optimistic outlook on the whole thing.

Tonight: A bunch of us Clarionauts went down to the bridge that leads to the cafeteria where we eat. From there, we saw two firework shows free, though both were partially obscured by trees. Scalzi brought his extremely charming family. Everyone else brought beers.

We all made wise-ass commentary throughout.

It was really, really fun.

And yes, Clarion students, being hardcore, work through the 4th of July. (Though, yes, some of our number aren't American.)

As for me, I turned in my second story, today. It's hard to turn in work you're not sure is done. It's also hard no to look over the shoulders of fellow students as they write comments in the margins.

You know what's not hard, though? Having my work read and considered by very thoughtful people. It's a really nice feeling.

Clarion Notes: Day 2

2011-06-28T14:41:00.000-07:00

Workshops: We're all parts in the same group critique machine. I think we're all figuring out where we fit, if that makes sense. It feels like my writing brain is breaking down and rebuilding itself. This setting feels good.

The writing exercise today was excellent: write ten beginnings to ten different stories! Filing away that one for later and possibly using some of the openings for the coming weeks.

Homework: Finish story and print/email before 5pm! Then read the three other stories that will be critiqued tomorrow!

Getting to bed on time may be a pipe dream.

Clarion Notes: Day 1 (I guess I am sticking with the list format, then.)

2011-06-28T00:03:00.001-07:00

Today: Geisel Library, top floor, and its lovely view! Wrote things here while roommate edited.

Also, an adventure to and from Trader Joe's during dinner time that involved creative paths, walking along highways, through hotel parking lots, and over a fence. There was an incident with bananas which isn't half as exciting as those words would lead you to believe (one of the bananas was too ripe and split open).

Afterward, sat with some fellow students in the evening and wrote and edited our things. Beer was drunk, YouTube was played. Conversation can be very distracting from completing assignments.

Workshops: Fun! So fun. I've missed the classroom. The round robin is a delightful method of workshopping, with everyone feeding off each other's opinions and energy.

Food: Remains decent, college cafeteria fare. Hidden breakfast cereal section discovered. Will remember location for future tactical advantage in avoiding not-good food.

Homework: Critique three stories, continue working on Wednesday piece.

Writing Update: I have a middle-ish part happening.

Clarion Notes: Day 0 (Into the Jungle)

2011-06-26T20:12:00.000-07:00

Arrival time at UCSD campus: 1:30pm(ish?) which my Eastern Standard Time synced body informed me was 4:30, so I was ready for a nap.

Instead, I was given waivers to sign, a campus map, a packet of emergency numbers, and a handy, dandy planner.

Food: Pasta and salad for dinner after campus tour. The campus library (pictured) wants to be a tree when it grows up. Clarion stories of past attendees are on file from the 1960's to the present, there, free for perusal.

Homework: Critique three entry/portfolio stories of fellow students. Also, start piece for Wednesday.

Writing Update: I have a beginning! I think.

Verdict: Tired. I suspect, a very long time from now, I will not remember being tired my first day, just excited.

Clarion Call

2011-03-27T12:00:00.000-07:00

News!

News that has made me humbled but very happy.

And news that has reduced me to a ball of quivering nerves until June.

Because this is mainly a review blog, I choose not to talk about my private writing, fiction I've written and sent out on an increasingly regular basis since I was seventeen. I probably wouldn't talk about my fiction anyway, now that I think about it. Making up things is kind of hard and ideas can be fragile to maintain when made public.

Anyway.

One place my interest in writing has lead me in the past is to was an internship in New York with a small publishing house for a semester in college back in 2008.

Another place it's lead me was a completed application for the Clarion Science Fiction & Fantasy Workshop in San Diego. For weeks after paying the application fee, I expected an email rejection in my inbox. I promised myself I would continue applying until I got in.

Then, a couple short weeks ago, it turned out that 2011 would be the year I'll be part of Clarion, after all!

I'm still in disbelief, even after getting the go ahead to announce the news and seeing my name on the site. I keep expecting someone to call and regretfully inform me they made a mistake, but no one has! Talking to my future classmates online has only renewed my shock and excitement. My fellow participants look like an experienced and formidable bunch and I can't wait to meet them.

So, from late June to early August of this year, I'll be in San Diego taking part in one of the most prominent writing workshops in the country. My friends and family have sent me nothing but congratulations. Cousins who I assumed knew nothing of my writing ambitions have complimented me on how prestigious the program is.

I'm so incredibly thankful for this opportunity!

Of course I'll continue to update the blog until the program begins and probably afterward, too! During the six week course, though, I'll be trying to spend my time as best I can at UC San Diego where, between writing and sleeping, I'll probably be thinking about all my past instructors, friends, and family who encouraged me to this point and will continue to do so for a long time.

Fantasy/Sci-Fi Short Fiction, Triangulated

2011-03-26T10:34:00.000-07:00

Triangulation: End of the Rainbow
Edited by Bill Moran (2010)
PARSEC; Soft Cover; 153 pages; ISBN: 978-0-9828606-0-1

PARSEC Ink's annual sci-fi/fantasy anthology uses what initially appears to be a cheerful theme to unite a number of varied and unlikely short stories. I'm at a loss as to how I haven't heard about the yearly series until now.

Triangulation: End of the Rainbow could have been a cheesy collection in the sweetly manipulative vein of the Chicken Soup for the Soul series. Instead, the stories delve deeply into different subgenres of sci-fi/fantasy, featuring gods, post-apocalyptic societies, and tourist traps for aliens.

Some of the fiction relates in very obvious ways to rainbows, color, or even just The Wizard of Oz. The first story, for example, David Sklar's "The Rainbow Vendor," is just a metaphor for finding where things belong. Or at least that's what my interpretation was. This story is sugary but by no mean sets the tone for the volume.

Then you have creations like Tinatsu Wallace's "A Womb of My Own," where a not so distant future has developed the technology for men to have children, or Ron Sering's "Spirit House," where a man ends up in Bangkok to forget his messy divorce. Neither relates to rainbows in an obvious or cutesy way, but with quiet hints that don't get in the way of a good story.

So. Is this book good, fun, both, or neither?

The fiction is wild and varied, an unexpected but satisfying blend. Some are better than others but all have their moments of grace and interest.

Strong short stories include Amy Treadwell's "The House at the End of the Rainbow," D.K. Thompson's "Haole," and Aaron Polson's "The World in Rubber, Soft and Malleable." Most of the works are deeply involving and juxtapose each other nicely. Please note, though, that because this is an independent publication and staff resources are limited, words pop up missing once in a great while. It's not often but it can be jarring to read an excellent work of fiction and realize someone forgot to add an "and."

The collection ends on a dark note, first with Cat Rambo's "In Order to Conserve," about a world turning to black and white with no hope of regaining its old beauty. Perhaps more chilling is the afterward by editor Bill Moran.

Moran writes about the difficulties of maintaining a magazine in this age, specifically one devoted to fiction and fantasy. "Two cents a word is not a fair rate for the quality of stories we continue to find for these anthologies, not even close," he writes. "Yet it's more than we can justify, even with unpaid staff." He ends his outro talking about how he really believes in his work and knows what he's doing is important, but the tone of defeat is difficult to shake.

Literary magazines have never made very much money. I understand it's a hard business with few rewards.

But I just can't stand to think anyone who's participated in the creation of this book would believe they've failed when they've obviously succeeded so very well.

Good Actress? Good Sign.

2011-03-17T14:15:00.000-07:00

At the beginning of this year, I wrote about the first book in The Hunger Games series and its cinematic qualities. Though the book didn't leave me looking for more (yet), I thought it would make a pretty good film.

Also last year, I saw a brittle but exceptionally well done movie about meth dealers in the Ozarks. In Winter's Bone, Jennifer Lawrence stars as Ree, a ballsy 16-year old with military ambitions looking to save her mother and siblings from homelessness and starvation.

So guess who's been cast in the oddly similar role of Katniss Everdeen for the screen adaptation of Suzanne Collins's novel?

Maybe Lawrence is being typecast, but at least the filmmakers have the right idea. We need more kickass women in cinema, especially in mainstream movies.

Consider my ticket for the movie bought.

Down On Oxford Road

2011-03-09T00:00:00.000-08:00

Lauren Chaikin, Cleveland-based illustrator and possibly real life cartoon character, completed a comic a couple years ago that exists in the crossroads between time travel and slice of life.

The one-shot story, Oxford Road, is about a town made up of people who have been yanked out of different points in history. No historical figures, just people. It was pretty neat.

Now she's rewriting the story as a webcomic.

The comic is in its infancy, but I have high hopes for the time travel comedy and will be checking on its progress obsessively. The main characters are sweet, the art style is fun, and I happily await more developments.

Nostalgia Makes a Great Murder Mystery

2011-03-03T18:07:00.000-08:00

Where the Truth Lies by Rupert Holmes (2003)
Scribner; Hard Cover; 388 pages; ISBN: 0679452206

I picked up Jerry Lewis's autobiography, Dean and Me: A Love Story (2005), not because I'm an avid memoir reader but because I'm a fan of period pieces combined with humor. Also, balancing my literary diet with an autobiography was sort of a plus.

I also thought of Harpo Marx of the Marx Brothers and his wonderful book, Harpo Speaks (1961), which I highly recommend. It's one of my favorites. Harpo's memoir is entertaining, but doesn't skip on the details of an impoverished childhood in show business. I hoped for the same of Dean and Me, a story that mainly centered on Jerry Lewis and Dean Martin's famous comedy-musical team of the 1950's and its -up. Despite the material, it just didn't engage with anyone outside of its core audience.

I'm almost 100% sure Harpo Speaks was written with a lot of exaggeration. It's entertaining because it embraces the sweet nostalgia of a life and career that was probably a lot harder than it looked. Dean and Me, on the other hand, in describing all the mechanics of a two-man act and stopping only to reminisce on a dissolved friendship, feels pretty incomplete by comparison. Jerry Lewis's book just couldn't sustain its anecdotes with truth alone.

Where the Truth Lies, where a thinly veiled Jerry Lewis and Dean Martin become the center of a murder, is ultimately more satisfying because it is fiction.

Rupert Homles's crime thriller masterpiece brims with detail. Did he research every moment? Is every 1970's first class airline meal or theme restaurant scene completely reliable? Maybe Holmes is just drawing on blurred childhood experiences. It doesn't matter, certainly not within the context of a truly elating chapter involving a trip to a Disneyland of long ago.

Its love letter to the past, but it's still a crime story. K. O'Connor, a spunky journalist with an eye for detail, narrates her experiences with singer-actor Collins (inspired by Dean Martin) and comedian Lanny Morris (probably pretty close to Jerry Lewis) as she tries to compile the former's biography.

Like their very real counterparts, Collins and Morris are well known for their team-up in the 1950's. Unlike them, however, their relationship sours when a dead woman turns up in the bathroom of a hotel room reserved in their name. The theories behind what made their act work so well--a brotherly relationship possibly viewed by the audience in a homoerotic-subtext--makes for compelling reading during the course of the story. Details of their fall-out compromise the juiciest revelations of the third act.

Dean and Me describes what became of the real entertainment duo's careers with comparative dryness. Martin and Lewis were simply burned out, two show-biz giants ready to move on to other things. It's a boring ending to a legendary rise to fame, but its honest.

And honesty can be unsatisfying.

When I first picked up Where the Truth Lies, I was initially put off to what I thought was a bland title. Within the context of the double-meaning of "lies," however, it's very descriptive. The best--or, well, most entertaining--sort of truth in fiction is mainly the kind that's been embroidered with a few falsehoods.

So. Is this book good, fun, both, or neither?

Both, but the style takes some getting used to. It's very compact.

Holmes wants as much of the early seventies in the book as possible. If you love a good deal of description in your suspense, than you've found the right story; if not, I would still hesitate before skimming. Not only are some details are just too important to miss, the prose are often sumptuous.

The story begins to strain believability as it barrels toward the conclusion, but the ending is still fantastic. Recommended.

Freshly Squeezed from the Internet!

2011-01-26T11:24:00.000-08:00

Celebrated modern Renaissance woman and singer-songwriter Tori Amos is doing a musical. No title has been announced yet.

And fans of rock/indie/chick/ethereal/whatever sort of music Tori makes, saw that it was good, and rested.

***

For the uninitiated, a Mary-Sue or Gary-Stu character describes a fictional person written with little depth often seen as a self-insert of the author but far, far more perfect.

An interesting point of view on the subject is offered by comic creator Coelasquid in a level-headed essay-post, Don't worry guys, everything isn't a Mary-Sue:

"Mary Sue” characters are generally boring because they’re rich and everyone wants to be their friend and they have a smoking hot significant other and they’re the best at what they do. They’re already at the top, so their story has no room to arc. A protagonist can have rainbow hair, fourteen wings, and laser beams shooting from their purple eyes and still be interesting to read about if they have some kind of real human struggle in their life that the audience can connect with.

Also, Maslow's Pyramid of Human Needs is used to explain why Iron Man 2 was kind of lame. Recommended reading.

***

Here's some really cool and brief writing advice about self-expression and the importance of telling good stories.

***

The above picture is "Stag Hunting" from 15th century artist Wolfgang Buerer. It is pretty neat, I think.

"Only connect!"

2011-01-20T00:00:00.001-08:00

I wouldn't mind posting more regularly on this blog in order to have a more attentive conversation with possible readers. Due to my work schedule, I can probably post a small something-something every day, but that may end with too much focus on the project.

I do other things online: a Google Reader, Twitter, some posts on The Analytical Couch Potato, and the beginnings of a webcomic/sketch blog called Rabbit's Stew. Also, I have projects in the real world. You know, that thing.

I'm not sure if I want to continue updating every day. After a week, it does get a little exhausting.

Everyone should blog at their own pace, I guess, so I'll trying just doing a couple updates every few days for a while, okay?

Okay.

The Big Tease (Celluloid Navel Gazing)

2011-01-19T00:00:00.000-08:00

The best thing about a good trailer is that it teases, leaving just enough spaces for viewers to project their own stories into the cracks.

Take Terrence Malick's The Tree of Life, for instance.

What the hell is it about?

It doesn't look quite like science fiction, despite the images of planets and stars. It might be someone's memoir, but it doesn't look like it's told in a straightforward way. We know just enough about it to wet our appetites and prime the storytelling function in our brains--viewers already begin to cobble together a story at the juxtaposition of Brad Pitt and a baby's feet--but our information is limited.

The genre is unclear. Surreal, maybe? The main character is obvious, but we don't yet know which age the story will follow him through, and thus we're unsure which actor we'll be asked to identify with most.

Tree of Life is getting a lot of buzz for its obliqueness. Getting the haunting music out of my head has actually taken some work. (It's from Czech composer Bedřich Smetana, if you're interested.)

Trailers are made to hold just enough back, I guess. I can think of only a few that have done this so effectively, and the first that springs to mind is one of Pixar's films:

Minimal text.

A delicious build-up aided by "The Office" from Terry Gilliam's Brazil.

And a concise introduction to the main character.

My DVD copy of the film WALL-E is somewhere in my room. I'm very fond of the story, the tone, and the wonderful use of science fiction. Still, the movie I own bares only a passing resemblance to the movie hinted at in its teaser.

The teaser becomes the narrative, a story more thoroughly realized and emotionally satisfied in the mind than on film.

The Saccharine Stylings of Pogo

2011-01-18T00:00:00.000-08:00

The information age has helped create more than a few new sub-genres of music. With help from the Internet, it's also helped create more than a few new artists working in forms no one's really thought of as art before.

Nick Bertke or, known to his fans, Pogo, composes music with the use of nostalgia.

Or at least by cutting up nostalgic movies into their most potently sweet and bouncy parts. By sampling the sounds of characters rather than specific words and sentences, Pogo reconstructs films into catchy music. He's a surgeon with video and music editing tools.

After coming to the attention of the Internet with his moodily sweet Alice in Wonderland remix, the Perth native quickly gained an online following that any DJ or remix artist would envy.

One of my favorite works of video editing art is what he's done with The Secret Garden:

Nostalgia may be a powerful thing, but one can't bank on it forever. His music may be crafted with sentimentality, but Pogo's been busy. He's accepted work from Disney, Honda, and Showtime and looks as if he's done some work to expand his repertoire.

Pogo has now set his sites on a more international endeavor, "Remixing the World," starting with Johannesburg, South Africa:

Details for his next project can be found at his Kickstarter page, where the artist's next stop appears to be Tibet.

Entertained But Not Hungry for More Games, Yet

2011-01-17T00:00:00.000-08:00

The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins (2008)
Scholastic; Hard Cover; 384 pages; ISBN: 978-0439023481

One part Shirley Jackson's The Lottery, one part post-apocalyptic fiction, and one part reality television makes a compelling young adult novel.

As I read it, though, I wondered if the first book of Collins' Hunger Games series is a work of literature or a film script in book form. Learning about the author's past as a TV show writer was no surprise. Her story has a very cinematic quality that makes it a fast read. I was very pleased to learn Collins is adapting the book for film.

This writing style, though, also skips a lot of visual details and world building that would have been a delight to discover. Maybe that will just have to wait for later in the three-book series.

Katniss Everdeen, a 16-year old girl and skilled hunter, narrates how she is picked from children among a dozen districts to compete in a deadly gladiator game.

This game is hosted every year on television by the technologically advanced and blood thirsty Capital, the ruling city of a post-apocalyptic America. It's one of many techniques used to intimidate the twelve districts, the thirteenth of which was scorched off the face of the Earth when it rebelled. Food and wealth is strictly monitored and given as payment for which ever district wins the game.

It's a solid and terrifying idea and Suzanne Collins carries it wonderfully. She especially succeeds with the action of the story. Told in the present tense, it's difficult not to feel the fears and starvation that Katniss go through. She brave, honest, and an excellent point-of-view character.

Also well done are the links between blood sport and reality television. Katniss, along with surviving the games, must also win over the audience. She goes as far as to concoct a syrupy romance with her fellow tribute, Peeta Mellark, in scenes verging on a Harlequin romance novel parody.

Sometimes, Collins's scenes and situations are under-dressed. Katniss and her family live with the threat of starvation hanging over their heads, but what do they do to escape a life of unrelenting hardship? Do the televisions set up in everyone's houses provide other entertainment that keeps them too distracted to think of new ways to rebel?

And how does the Capitol justify its dehumanization of the districts? Yeah, they're wealthier and more technologically advanced, but I can only assume the people living there have convinced themselves that the poor are either subhuman or happy to sacrifice themselves for sport.

It's still a good premise, but I wish Collins had spent more time building her world.

So. Is this book good, fun, both, or neither?

The book is constructed to reel the reader in and is successful at it. It's especially fun when Katniss is running through the forest terrain of the stadium, figuring out traps and learning how to out-smart her opponents.

Some parts of the story were really unsatisfying, though. Most of the tributes have flat personalities, reduced too quickly to competitive creatures when they're as young and innocent as Katniss.

The experience of rooting for a character to kill other characters is deeply unsettling. Well-crafted and addicting, but unsettling. In a book about reality shows and the horror of living under a tyranny, I guess that's the intended effect.

I wouldn't hesitate to recommend it for certain readers and friends, especially ones with short attention spans, but myself? I'll be waiting a little while before I pick up the rest of the series.

Warning: Talk Show Violence and ANOTHER Post about Harry Potter

2011-01-16T00:00:00.000-08:00

When we look back at the Harry Potter films in the next couple decades, I'm not sure we'll think of them as good adaptations of the books. They're very rushed where a mini-series (or several mini-series, ahem) probably wouldn't be and they often stumble with their CGI where an animated adaptation wouldn't.

I know I'll certainly remember the Gothic sensibility brought to the series. Hogwarts Castle always looked like a dark, winding place with shaded courtyards and chilly hallways (possibly just "courtyard" and "hallway" as viewers were probably treated to the same locations from different angles many times).

The books and movies were also pretty twisted and scary, now that I think about it. Schoolchildren move from a boring outside world to an enclosed, safe fantasy palace that gets progressively less enclosed and safe as the story goes on. The main character deals with newly heightened danger in each volume.

Is it so strange that an actor from the movies ended up developing a slightly macabre sense of humor?

Or, judging by Radcliffe's enthusiasm for his role in Equus (yes, I saw it when I was in New York; he was good), perhaps he's always found guts and gore wonderfully funny and we've all been too blinded by his squeaky clean version of Harry Potter to notice.

(NSFW video. Dead Daniel Radcliffe.)

Regardless, I think the actor's got a unique career ahead of him even if that head might be missing.

(You totally didn't see that pun coming. I just know it.)

The Bleakest of Webcomic Comedies (Part 3)

2011-01-15T00:00:00.000-08:00

Pictures for Sad Children by John Campbell

John Campbell's Pictures for Sad Children, the last entry in this abbreviated list, takes a minimalist's approach to the miseries of the world.

His characters are often indistinguishable from another beyond hairstyles, unless you're the sheet-wearing Paul, who is a ghost. More recent comics, as of 2010, have experimented with this style, but the simple lines and shapes have already become as a part of Campbell's art as a thumbprint.

His stories deal with depression in an upfront way. His territory feels unique. He treats molestation, first world problems, and lazy roommates in a casually in a way that can't help but put high-light the horribleness of each problem.

Reading Campbell's work is both delightful and nerve-wracking. He grabs the reader by the guts and doesn't let go, not even if they struggle. My recommendation? Don't struggle. Let the desperation and paradoxical humor of each panel sink in.

I'm not going to ask how he squeezes so much empathy out of viewers for characters with circle-heads and dots for eyes. I think Scott McCloud talks about identifying with simple shapes in the much loved Understanding Comics. Charles Schulz was so successful at it, Peanuts is the most widely run newspaper comic in the world, and he's dead. If that's not success, I don't know what is.

Even by the school-children-who-are-horribly-unlucky standard of Peanuts, though, Pictures for Sad Children is pretty bleak. It flaunts it right in the title. Even outside the confines of the Internet, John Campbell likes to talk about the things that make you sad and uncomfortable. Just check out some images from an art show he did this past year.

Humor has the most potential to be one of the most honest mediums out there. Why, online, are funny webcomics mainly about gaming? There's a whole human condition to poke, weep, and laugh about. I guess that's why the really skewed but funnily sad (sadly fun?) comics stick out so much.

The Bleakest of Webcomic Comedies (Part 2)

2011-01-14T00:00:00.000-08:00

Perry Bible Fellowship by Nicholas Gurewitch

One of the great tragedies of the Internet is that Nicholas Gurewitch's surreal Perry Bible Fellowship rarely updates, anymore.

Then again, considering how much detail goes into each colorful panel, the attentiveness and variation of style, and the precision of each strange joke, perhaps it's best to allow Gurewitch all the time he needs.

I mean, if his current projects are such gems like the short film, Martha's B-Day, why press him to keep a regular update schedule?

Martha's B-Day 10-09-1985 from New Picture Agencies on Vimeo.

Dark twists, as you may notice, are his specialty.

Like Nightmare Theatre, Gurewitch's comic treats sex, religion, and suicide as viable material from which any number of jokes can be squeezed. Unlike Ricky Garduno, however, Gurewitch rarely revisits the same characters. He's content to concentrate on form and beautifully ludicrous stories.

When I first discovered Perry Bible Fellowship in its update hey-day, I was baffled and a little nervous by the comic. It was, and remains, one of the strangest and darkly fascinating creations on the Internet. Gurewitch has since gone on to win an Ignatz Award, the Web Cartoonist's Choice Award, and an Eisner.

Surely, there will be more work from Nicholas Gurewitch in the future, but I'll try and be content with the archives and the scraps of his presence still found online. He's a difficult person to forget.

The Bleakest of Webcomic Comedies (Part 1)

2011-01-13T08:00:00.000-08:00

Dumm Comics 1930 Nightmare Theatre by Ricky Garduno

Dumm Comics, as of January 13, 2010, hosts five different artists and their creations. Of the current line-up, only one webcomic updates three times a week, give or take a few guests: Ricky Garduno.

His comic, Nightmare Theatre, is a pastiche of cute retro-designed characters who do awful, awful things. Kimbo SnugglePupp, his friends, and the various incarnations that switch between the early twentieth and twenty-first century, regularly indulge in Lovecraftian sacrifice and vicarious murder.

They also get their hearts broken, as evidenced in the above comic.

Garduno doesn't only pull humor from blood and guts but a deep, private sadness. The mood varies between comics, keeping Nightmare Theatre one of the most involving and popular of the Dumm set.

The artist keeps the story loose, giving him plenty of room to vary his material. He's not shy about including his opinions on culture or painful personal anecdotes. Kimbo, the dog-like main character, is malleable. He can be a self-insert for the cartoonist's views or a fully formed lunatic with his own problems. (NSFW)

Yes, many of his comics are not safe for work or, well, not safe for life. That's part of the fun, though. The Depression-era style and violent/scatological humor just barely mask a thoughtful look at insecurity and misery.

Yeah, there's cannibalism, dark arts, and mayhem, but Nightmare Theatre remains a work of love. That love may be inspired by the hilarities of perversion and misery, but it's love none-the-less.

The Problem of Owen

2011-01-12T10:54:00.000-08:00

I am in a Conundrum.

I've finally gotten around to Doctor Who, an excellent British TV show that's been on (and off) air since the early 1960's. It's fun and beautifully written and I am having a great time watching it. It's science fantasy at its best, with a magic man, his blue police box, and all of space and time as his playground.

So, while combing through the 2005 reboot of Who, I decided to revisit its spin-off, Torchwood. I was first exposed to the series less than a year ago and couldn't remember why I had put off seeing more of it.

Then I did.

Owen.

Owen Harper.

(Italics = said through grit teeth.)

All right, the premise of Torchwood is solid, with a cast of folks dealing with aliens and other monstrosities in Cardiff, Wales. The tension is fantastic, the effects are neat, and the main character, Captain Jack Harkness (John Barrowman), is dashing as hell.

Also, because it's made for slightly more adult audiences than Doctor Who, there's some wonderful implications of bed hopping.

So it looks and feels like a series worth watching, following, and obsessing over into the wee hours of the morning.

Then there's Owen Harper (Burn Gorman), one of the most unbearable characters I've ever seen on screen. He's the doctor of the group and is meant to be somewhat obnoxious. Unfortunately, he's not the sort of obnoxious doctor that's fun to watch. In his first appearance, he uses alien technology to make a girl (and her boyfriend) become so attracted to him, they sleep with him.

It's creepy, rape-y (or, okay, just plain rape), and, worst of all in the land of fiction, can't be dismissed with charm. Owen doesn't have any. He badgers, whines, and hasn't done anything remotely useful beyond being in the right place at the right time.

I don't demand characters who are paragons of virtue, but Owen makes otherwise fun scenes nail-bitingly difficult to watch.

Compared to Doctor Who, Torchwood has comparatively few episodes and could probably be polished off in a matter of weekends.

But--

Owen. Owen.

Until I find an answer to my problem, beyond putting my fingers in my ears and humming loudly every time the character is on screen, I'll either have to stick to Doctor Who or learn to love hating a really hate-able character.

I am Baby Cakes, You are Baby Cakes, We Are the World (NSFW awkward humor)

2011-01-11T13:16:00.000-08:00

When artist Brad Neely's short, strange still animations started to appear on Adult Swim, I initially dismissed them as more of the awkward Tim and Eric humor Cartoon Network became so gung-ho about in its "do-we-really-have-to-show-cartoons?" age of weirdness. Tim and Eric has its spastic, approving audience, but I'm not it; Brad Neely, on the other hand, has reeled me in completely.

His humor's awkward, too, of course, and often scatological and (for some reason) Harry Potter and wizard obsessed, but his quirky style and keen observations separate him from the usual "lol!random" Internet 'toons. He's still part of their number, but he defines the form rather than succumbing to its video game and meme simplicities.

Neely's most endearing character is Baby Cakes, a 30+ man-child and struggling musician living with his father. Though the audience is at first meant to laugh at the character's love for alcohol and D&D, his absolute sureness in magic, music, and wizards allows plenty of room for appreciation and love:

It's strange how Baby Cakes is both awkwardly hilarious and able to achieve a point of view of such grace. His philosophy is paradoxically enlightened and blunted by stupidity, fantastically skewed and privately meaningful.

I didn't catch the short lived Super Deluxe while it was airing on television, but caught up online with the adventures of the misguided crew of the fictional China, Illinois. Brad Neely doesn't appear to be producing much in the way of independent animation lately, but if and when he does, I hope he returns to his beloved, child man hero.

Dog Days

2011-01-09T23:04:00.000-08:00

What time is it? I think it's link round-up time!

***

The Borders Bookstore chain is maybe-possibly-probably-this-time going out of business. Factors include, but are not limited to, Amazon.com, Kindle, Barnes and Noble's partnership with Starbucks, and a bad economy. Also, Borders has been more than a few not-so-good business decisions in the past.

My opinion? While I don't think this will usher in the death of print media, I do think that the future will bring us bookstores that are largely successful when combined with other media or else focused on marketing books as a "specialty item."

Books aren't fast food or Blockbuster films--there's hours of concentration needed for each one. When people no longer have the disposable income and time to spend on them, you have to change selling tactics. Failure to embrace the changes (making ebooks, for example) will leave you out in the cold. I'm horribly sad Borders is going but I'm not surprised.

I don't think books will disappear. That's a panic-driven mode of thinking. Book-length stories are part of the scene, whether they're digested as movie series, television shows, or traditional media.

Books have always had a niche group in broader culture while their general popularity goes in cycles. They'll survive.

***

I've been enjoying the hell out of Cory Doctorow's "With a Little Help," a free book of short stories available online. Download the audio here! Normally, I turn up my nose at audio books like the hipster I am. This time, it's different.

Stand-outs in the collection include the wonderful, paranoia Google-fantasy "Scroogled" and "The Right Book," a piece about book selling in the future which seems enormously appropriate for the contents of this post.

EDIT: I forgot to add that Doctorow accepts donations in an effort to look for a new business model to sell books and because "With a Little Help" is free. I sent a few dollars his way and received a very kind email as a result. It was super sweet!

***

Said the Gramophone is an indie (?) music blog where "all tracks are posted out of love" and accompanied with links to buy the music.

The tracks are often posted with short stories and fragments, too. Sometimes these prose-poems have nothing obvious to do with the music besides an enthralled listener's response to the fluctuating sounds.

Here's an interesting one by Dan Bierne posted with The Dø's "The Calendar":

What an elegant statue. My, yes, how elegant. Is that soap stone? A lovely deep purple with white etchings. Life-size, my yes. What...I hope you don't take offense to this. What...I ask this only to prove my own ignorance, it has nothing to do with... What..hm... What is it... what is it supposed to be? Sorry, pardon me, what was that? I couldn't quite hear you. Oh, you didn't hear me? Oh, I'm sorry, I asked..what is it supposed...to be? Ah, I see, of course! A woman, of course! I am so sorry I had to ask, as that is obviously what it is supposed to be. I mean, it is obviously what it is! My goodness! How elegant! My yes, live-size, absolutely. Ahem. Hm. My. Yes. Elegant. So... Ahem. Elegant, yes. Ahem. So... is that....hm....is that....goodness...is that....the head?

***

The above image is from Baccio Maria Bacci (1888 - 1974) which I found on the fantastic blog, Art Inconnu - Little-know and under-appreciated art.

Analytical Couch Potatoes United

2010-12-30T12:48:00.000-08:00

I just contributed an article to The Analytical Couch Potato on the 2010 adaption of True Grit!

Make sure to bookmark the site! It has a lot of awesome posts that analyze videos games, TV shows, and movies.

Oh, and as for the picture on the left, that really is a screencap from the film. Want to know the context? I can't recommend seeing it more.

A Book of Movie Flops and Thoughtful Re-Analysis

2010-12-21T22:58:00.000-08:00

My Year of Flops by Nathan Rabin (2010)
Scribner; Soft Cover; 261 pages; ISBN: 9781439153123

Optimism isn't bad; it's merely unfashionable.

As a young person, I had an obsession with movie reviews in the Friday entertainment section of my local paper and my mother's copy of the New Yorker. I read with manic glee as film critics eviscerated culture trash for daring to have the wrong actor or tone, salting the newly torn wounds of producers and film studios alike. When these critics delighted in a movie and lauded its artistic strengths, I mirrored their delight and rejoiced in the prose they used to build up the films they took under their wings.

A good beating is always much more satisfying to watch, however, though not always warranted.

In middle school, I began to suspect that these critics weren't always right. Sure, their dismissive attitudes and flowery word choices intrigued me, but it came to my attention that I didn't always agree. I briefly squelched these feelings, believing that the critics I read had a holy mission to preach the "correct" way to view pop culture.

Then I realized that I disagreed with plenty of people about what "correct" meant, both in life and on the page. Ang Lee's 2003 adaption of The Hulk yielded a universal shrug that didn't quite fit with what I thought was a thoughtful, moody, if somewhat plodding comic book movie. Yeah, there could have been more sequences with tanks being ripped in half, but the movie seemed to yield tons of dismissive criticism it just didn't deserve. The owner of a comic shop I could never bring myself to visit regularly opined that the trailer for the film made the Hulk "jump around like the Jolly Green Giant." And all I could think was, "Well, yeah. He's the Hulk. That's kind of what he looks like."

My faith in the cynical review system was shaken. The critiques of Lee's adaption weren't groundless, but they certainly didn't feel right. Movies deserve a chance––or two, or ten––and a little time to find a true audience.

This indulgent thesis drives Nathan Rabin's My Year of Flops, a collection of comic essays written for his column of the same name. His three year project (and counting) chronicles the orphans of modern entertainment, movies that critically, commercially, or financially failed but live on in secret as they wait for the right viewer.

The comedy of each column, whether Rabin is writing about the buddy-cop BDSM crime caper, Exit to Eden (1994) or the forgotten hippie musical, The Apple (1980), often gives way to deeper pathos. In writing about what he thinks makes a movie watchable or good, Rabin is ultimately and intimately writing about himself, his own tastes, and personal history. His humor is so self-deprecating, this style comes off less as egotism than as a serious and gentle rumination of the relationship between film and viewer.

Many of Rabin's verdicts are surprising, but he never gives reason to show his feelings are misguided. His kind review of Jim Carrey's creepy suspense comedy, The Cable Guy (1996), is colored by the writer's teen years in a group home where film entertainment appeared to be his only outlet. Acknowledging but eventually glossing over a movie's critical flaws, he pieces together the remains in what's certainly a more honest look at how viewers watch movies.

Rabin also finds redeeming qualities in oddities like Johnny Cash's vanity project, Gospel Road: A Story of Jesus (1973) and Steve Martin and Bernadette Peters's depressing remake, Pennies from Heaven (1981). The book chronicles his journey to compassionate film analysis. While I disagreed with many of his reviews, they always contained some particle of personal investment.

Many of these reviews are still wonderfully searing, of course, especially his essays on the incredibly stupid adaption of Demi Moore's The Scarlet Letter (1995) and the liberty it took with its source material. Memorable evicerations also include the faux-bohemian (but cute) Rent (2005) and the bumpy lesbian literary epic, Even Cowgirls Get the Blues (1993).

"Three years of My Year of Flops have instilled in me an eagerness to see the good in everything," Rabin writes in his last chapter. I was especially touched by his sweetly forgiving essays on Tom Hanks's forgotten adventure in Joe Versus the Volcano (1990) and the aforementioned Hulk (2003), which Rabin suggests may just be a comic book movie for fans who prefer Chris Ware to Stan Lee.

The appendix tacked onto the end of the book, a minute-by-minute review of Waterworld: The Director's Cut (1995) feels empty and threatens to dissipate the good will Rabin builds. It does not, however, exist just to " just so he can prove how good he is at coming up with killer quips" as Stephenie Zacharek's oddly vicious review in the New York Times suggests. The point of the book is that even the most disposable pieces of modern culture are worth time and critical thinking. Waterworld may be in the wrong portion of the book, but it has a right to be a part of Rabin's journey as much as anything else.

So. Is this book good, fun, both, or neither?

Definitely fun and, for a certain kind of reader, indispensable. This is the sort of book that ought to be mandatory when teaching film students how to find their voice. I can imagine excerpts being used to teach high school students not only how to write an essay but how to show you're sincere about it.

Letting popular critics judge films on a good-bad dichotomy may be far more hurtful than helpful to the culture at large. Nathan Rabin's crusade of optimistic film re-evaluation obliterates this scale and asks readers to think for themselves.

Read Your Books

2010-12-10T16:36:00.000-08:00

When writing a review of anything, whether it's a collection of Garfield comics or Ulysses, please remember to read the source material.

And that the work in question has actually been published.

The A.V. Club is an excellent entertainment review site; I have a feeling this incident is an isolated one.

I'm probably biased because I'm a big fan of regular features like Nathan Rabin's My Year of Flops column (and now book), with its in-depth cinema essays that transcend the usual pessimism of critical analysis, and The Inventory, an attempt to connect partially-related songs, movies, books, actors, etc. into eclectic and entertaining lists.

Some of the reviews on the rest of the site are hit or miss, but in general, it's a great thing, this A.V. Club.

That's why a fake review is such a shock.

Don't lie, kids, especially when you work for an otherwise very neat site.

Love and the Cult of Celebrity

2010-12-03T14:33:00.000-08:00

Love in Infant Monkeys by Lydia Millet (2009)
Soft Skull Press; Soft Cover; 177 pages; ISBN: 9781593762520

Lately, I've been on a quirk binge.

Why not? Quirk makes the world a more charming place, where no drama is too serious to insert a little playfullness.

Filmmaker Wes Anderson is partly responsible for my recent descent into the giddy joys of quirkdom. I've long been a fan of The Royal Tenenbaums (2001) and have heard excellent things about Rushmore (1998), but didn't think to watch the latter until a few days ago. Then I watched The Darjeeling Limited (2007) and The Fantastic Mr. Fox (2009) in close succession. Thus, my senses have been beguiled with sumptuous, deep-focused and deeply detailed shots.

I've (happily) fallen prey to the siren song of Anderson's world, where gentle caricatures use soft-spoken dialogue to express their worst fears and every set is colorful and inviting.

Having quirk and no content is useless, however. Wes Anderson would have been written off by critics long ago if all he produced was fluff. He starts with innocent situations and works down deep to find the gritty problems beneath them.

Which brings me to Lydia Millet's writing, where gritty troubles are handled delicately but in a warm manner.

Millet's 2003 award-winning novel, My Happy Life, dresses up an orphan heroine as a clinically cheerful Pollyanna thankful for every waking moment, no matter how dire. Happy Life is a dark narrative about abuse and neglect, but the main character is too innocent to realize how poorly she's been mistreated. It's never explained whether her upbeat attitude is a mental defect or raw naiveté, but her baseless optimism saves a genuinely beautiful novel from plummeting to dreary depths.

On the other hand, Lydia Millet's story collection Love in Infant Monkeys (2009) starts off with a fairly cute idea––narratives combining celebrities and animals––and uses the theme as a springboard for far deeper contemplation. The ten story collection moves from modern tabloid darlings to historical superstars.

The first and one of the strongest pieces of the book, "Sexing the Pheasant," is written from the perspective of Madonna as she hunts birds in the woods with Guy Ritchie. The story was probably penned when the pair were still a couple (to my limited media knowledge, they no longer are), but feels far more timeless. In "Pheasant," the Madonna described is a performer lucky enough to land the title of "icon" though far from reluctant to take full credit for her ascent to fame. The depiction is never fully flattering or critical; Madonna is written as thoughtful and intelligent if unaware of the extent that power has affected her.

"Girl and Giraffe" concerns conservationist and lion-aficionado George Adamson as he relates his observation of a surreal encounter between predator and prey. Though written masterfully, the story doesn't quite match up with "Sexing the Pheasant," though its details are as sharp as Millet can get in her writing.

"Sir Henry" and "Love in Infant Monkeys" are moodier character pieces, with the former concerning a high strung dog walker and his celebrity clientele and the latter about scientist Harry Harlow and his experiments. The portraits are incredibly intimate but never judgmental. Millet is often as closely connected to her human characters as her non-human ones. There are certainly moments I wished she would probe her subjects deeper, but these moments are few and far between.

"Thomas Edison and Vasil Golakov" hits a far deeper vein. Edison's filming of the electrocution of an elephant, Topsy, and his subsequent (and imagined) conversations with the still images creates an involving tale. Lydia Millet's creativity proves to be staggering.

"Tesla and Wife," "Chomsky, Rodents," and "Jimmy Carter's Rabbit" step away from the cult of celebrity a little, allowing fans and observers of the celebrities in question to have more developed voices in the narratives. "Tesla" is excellent, but "Chomsky" and "Jimmy Carter's Rabbit" are a couple of the weakest stories of the collection. Considering the strength of the entire book together, though, I would have to read them out of context to see how weak they are alone.

"The Lady and the Dragon," without giving anything away, takes a step further back to consider the illusion of and fascination with celebrities and how they affect the lives of otherwise fairly normal individuals. It's an excellent companion piece to "Sexing the Pheasant," with one complimenting the themes of the other.

The last story, "Walking Bird," like "Chomsky" and "Jimmy Carter," is difficult to consider outside of the collection. It feels more like an end piece than an individual story.

An initially quirky premise, at the end of the book, seems like a perfect stage to question the human condition. Stepping out of her stories, afterward, tempts dizziness and disorientation. The worlds she creates, like Wes Anderson's, are bubbles of reality that aren't quite as separate from the rest of the world as they seem.

Anderson is somehow chiefly a mainstream director despite his unusual fare, breathing life into a medium largely held down by the thumbs of meddling film studios. Millet, meanwhile, somehow brings new meaning to the lives of oft-written about mega-celebrities.

There's an intriguing power to the way Lydia Millet handles subjects and people normally over-written. They feel new in her capable hands, revived from the tabloids and studios that have used them to often.

So. Is this book good, fun, both, or neither?

Both, but especially good considering the artfulness with which Millet uses language.

Love in Infant Monkeys isn't a very long distraction for the voracious reader, though. It can be polished off comfortably in an afternoon; two if you're reading more than one book at the time or are switching back and forth between a film.

NaNo No-No: A Plea for Quality Over Quantity

2010-11-29T16:35:00.001-08:00

NOTE: I kind of feel like an ass for talking about my own writing on a blog about other people's writing. This post, though, is something I've wanted to write all month.

Yesterday, I finished 50,000 words of a project I'd been working on for several weeks. I was happy I finished. It felt good. I also looked back on what I wrote and realized how rushed and inconsistent it was.

I was glad to be done for all the wrong reasons.

National Novel Writing Month, or NaNoWriMo, is an Internet movement, much like Talk Like a Pirate Day except propelled with the innocent aspirations of a million would-be writers.

Participants compete to write a novel (or at least 200 pages double-spaced) in a month's time. That month is November, one of the busiest months of the year, full of Thanksgiving road trips, finals, job evaluations, and planning for the holidays. For lovers of NaNo, writing becomes an escape from the flurry of scheduling demands. Other participants who find only frustration in the event endure with masochistic fervor.

NaNoWriMo teaches the discouraged that anyone can write if they push themselves to do it. It's a wonderful confidence high to complete a project like that, one that leaves you happily coasting for months to come.

This writing event teaches pride, though, not eloquence or brevity. Re-reading my own story for the past month has revealed an embarrassing number of errors that could have been avoided with more time and care.

Writing with your gut can be wonderful; re-evaluating it with your brain can be indispensable.

I guess it's not a good thing when writing becomes solely about word counts and pumping out as many adverbs as possible to meet a self-imposed deadline. Unless someone still feels a sense of art to what she's doing––and some NaNo participants do––the whole project can be a mess of empty self-congratulation.

All right, I wrote a novel this November. That's an accomplishment to have started and finished something like that. But is it my best work? Did I do something I was proud of?

Maybe, in some ways. But in others? No. Absolutely not.

Editing is supposed to come at some far flung point in the future for every NaNo project. November is for first drafts and first drafts, as many creative writing teachers have said to discouraged students, are allowed to be terrible.

They are. It's okay.

It's not okay, though, to congratulate one's self for writing 50,000 words without any thought.

Anything worth that much time is meant to be done well, not crammed into a schedule.

All art is, in its way, a little vain and definitely about the artist and her vision, but I don't like patting myself on the back for a long piece that was stressful to write and, at the end of the day, not very good.

I've competed and won NaNo a couple of years in the past, but something's been off since 2008. I've begun to pause and think about getting the best word I can think of rather than the first.

I've been sending short stories to magazines and lit agents for a little while now, and after being published for the first time with a piece that's probably one of my shortest completed to date, I can definitely say editors value quality over quantity.

It's an achievement to finish a goal of 50,000 words––it's a lot and proves dedication––but what is each word worth individually?

I'm afraid NaNoWriMo doesn't teach eloquence or technique, but it does teach confidence in one's craft. It's just the writer's job to make sure that confidence is well-earned.

There's a lot of books out there in the world. It's the responsibility of everyone who produces them that they be the best quality they can be.

Harry Potter and the Hit-or-Miss Movie Franchise

2010-11-19T01:45:00.000-08:00

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 1 (2010)
Director: David Yates (with Ben Hibbon directing The Tale the of Three Brothers animated short)
Cast: Daniel Radcliffe, Rupert Grint, and Emma Watson
Screenplay: Steve Kloves (adapted from J.K. Rowling's book of the same name)
Other: Fantasy/Adventure, Drama
Grade: B-

Throughout each film in the Harry Potter franchise, there are perfect, joyful moments. In some places, the movies even improve bits and pieces of the books that, despite Rowling's creativity, just didn't work.

For every one of these moments, though, there's five minutes of bumpy storytelling, forced emotion, or meaningless CGI.

Maybe a future adaptation of Rowling's full series––one that, I hope, judging from an impressive sequence in Deathly Hallows Part 1, is fully animated––will balance the magic of the books with the visual language of film-making. Today, the series as a whole is pretty hit or miss at best, soggy and dull at worst.

So, for the most part, despite seeing each one of the films, I've been largely unsatisfied with the adaptions of Rowling's books to screen.

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows is not adapted from my favorite book. The last volume of Rowling's amazing work just doesn't feel as welcoming or warmly private as the rest of the series. Maybe it's because the plot line deviates so much from the pattern set by the rest of the books.

No Hogwarts or Hogwarts Express until the latter half! Every atom in me cringed when I read it for the first time and realized how far the plot would wander from the usual haunts of the characters. Instead, it's all camping and slow build-up.

Or maybe the last book feels so strange because Rowling finally realized her world, after ten years, now belonged to the public as much as it belonged to her. My theory is that she knew her fans were waiting for her to finish and her writing suffered from the pressure. In interviews, of course, she's said she's satisfied with the story she told, so this is purely speculation.

The first part of the movie adaption feels tightly constructed when the original book was everywhere at once. The actors, producers, and production team involved have been making these films for a very long time. They know the rhythm. Masterful hands are at work here, smoothing the edges of a series that began to fray before it ended.

Deathly Hallows Part 1 begins with each of the three core characters in separate scenes, all connected by a sense of isolation. Harry Potter (Daniel Radcliffe) watches his adoptive family, the Dursleys, pack up and abandon their house on Privet Drive; Ron Weasley (Rupert Grint) stands outside his home while his mother and sister are behind him, working in the kitchen; and Hermione Granger (Emma Watson), in an action that may flummox viewers who haven't read the book, erases her parents memories and strips each photo in their house of her image.

These three actors provide the most emotionally satisfying moments of the film, whether they're together or alone.

Some of their performances have been uneven in the past––Watson plays Hermione with a melodramatic flare and Radcliffe has always made an intense Harry Potter––but at this point, they know their characters front to back. Radcliffe, Watson, and Grint are as ferociously charming as they were as children in the first film, though they don't approach their roles with anything resembling the same naivete. Each character knows exactly who he or she is even if the world around them is in a state of flux.

The story keeps the three of them as its centerpiece when Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry is nowhere in sight.

For a little while, the far more liberal storyline allows the movie to play with its own genre. Seeing the characters wandering around metropolitan London and sitting in a diner is surreal but strangely nice, as if the series were an urban fantasy instead of a boarding school fairy tale.

The entire story briefly becomes a heist film when Harry, Ron, and Hermione disguise themselves as adults and break into the Ministry of Magic. It's an interesting moment of speculation on behalf of the franchise as their disguises could just as easily be the aged characters in a few decades.

Ron's storyline, like the book, moves the film into Arthurian legend and loyalty. Grint has had a tough time finding his footing with his character in the past. While Rowling's books make him complex and vulnerable, his outstanding characteristic on screen has mainly been "inept." I'm sure the screenplay is more at fault than the actor, however, as Deathly Hallows finally shows Grint playing the flawed but noble guy he was always meant to play.

His finest hour is no doubt the film's weirdest, though, with an awkward hallucination and mucky teenage emotions that stay with the viewer for a long time afterward.

So. Is this film good, fun, both, or neither?

It's the best made and most involving of the series, but long, drawn-out segments of the film are neither.

It earns some of my love for two things: 1) its brilliantly executed animation sequence and 2) my nostalgia for the rest of the series, an emotion that some viewers just aren't going to feel as firmly.

During the film, a number of characters die. It's a Harry Potter film, though, so this is par for the course. One death, however, hit me terribly hard and I began to cry as I sat at the midnight showing, otherwise happily sandwiched between good friends.

Though I whine about the flaws of the Harry Potter films, they are as wrapped up in my life as the books ever were. This movie dredged up all the hormonally sodden memories of my early and late teenage years, especially the ones where books like Harry Potter and the Prisoner Azkaban seemed like the only dependable companions in the world. I cried for the death of the character as well as for myself. I felt a sense of isolation I hadn't felt since I was much younger.

I don't feel as emotionally cutoff as I once did, but the angst of Deathly Hallows reminds me of those days.

This series of Harry Potter films will probably never be perfect, no matter the perfect execution of its performances or how many times Daniel Radcliffe takes off his shirt (it's like the filmmakers want to make his pecs a co-star or something), but I'm glad there's another film. Saying goodbye with this one would have been all right––it's the best in the series, right now––but it would have been too soon for the franchise as a whole.

Five Disconcerting Sci-Fi Stories Involving Sleep

2010-11-13T23:49:00.000-08:00

1. The Revivalist by Albert E. Cowdrey (2006) (novella)

When Edward Fogherty sleeps, he doesn't age. He deals with his coma-like sleeping patterns in the early twentieth century, all the while attracting the attentions of Myra Means, a love interest who is at first a few years older than him. Their age gap, due to Edward's abilities, alters over time.

Dodging drafts and while plotting to remain young into the next century, Cowdrey's often comatose main character eventually learns his abilities have a Rip Van Winkle inspired price.

I discovered this short story/novella in a fantastic March issue of Fantasy & Science Fiction Magazine back in 2006. Edward's attempt to cheat death by spending days and eventually years at a time asleep is entrancing to read about.

2. "Magnetic Rose," Memories (1995) (animated film)

Director Katsuhiro Otomo's 1995 anime film, Memories, compiles three of his manga short stories. The first, "Magnetic Rose," is the most gripping.

A team of space scavengers looking through interstellar trash receive a distress signal from what appears to be a space station.

Two of their members, family man Heintz and womanizing Miguel, board the craft. They discover an abandoned European palace, complete with looping holograms and portraits of a lovely retired soprano, Eva Friedal.

The ship soon entangles both men in a haunted dream of Eva's own devising, blurring reality for all three of them. To the surprise of no one, the writer who adapted this story to screen is the late Satoshi Kon who would later go on to direct the psychological animated series Paranoia Agent (2004) and hallucinatory movie, Paprika (2006).

3. The Dry Salvages by Caitlin R. Kiernan (2004) (novella)

An old woman recalls a journey she took into deep space, one that involved spending years of her life in hyper-sleep. Audrey Cather is an exopalentologist and lone survivor of a mission that involves investigating life on Piros, a moon of a distant planet that orbits Gliese 587. Her tale is short but leaves a remarkably dire impression.

Untrustworthy robots and Lovecraftian horrors may be the monsters of this sci-fi horror show, but most unnerving of all is how casually Cather, our narrator, describes not only the alien ruins her crew discover but the ultimately pointless mission that eats away at most of her life.

4. "The Ghost Inside" by Broken Bells (self-titled album) (2010)

Another story about the dangers of interstellar sleep, this time told through a chilling music video starring actress Christina Hendricks as a cyborg.

Perhaps it's a metaphor of what we do when we're willing to do anything to reach a goal; maybe it's just an exploration of the saying, "I'd give an arm and a leg." Or it could just be a nice counterpoint to an otherwise low-key song.

Regardless, it's a melancholy journey with a robotic woman and her dream.

5. "And Still She Sleeps" by Greg Costikyan (2000) (short story)

Perhaps the best story to end this list on is a retelling of Sleeping Beauty from one of the collections Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling have edited, Black Heart, Ivory Bones. While this book isn't a bad addition to their series of re-told fairy tale anthologies, its best story belongs to author Greg Costikyan.

Applying fantasy tropes to the real world, "And Still She Sleeps" asks why, exactly, Sleeping Beauty is considered a romantic trope. How does a man truly love a woman he's only met while she sleeps? Disney's 1959 adaption of the story solved the problem by suggesting the princess and the prince knew each other beforehand.

Costikyan suggests a woman unearthed during a 19th century excavation may end up sleeping forever when the only men willing to kiss her are the ones attracted to her beauty and nothing more.

It's a sobering point of view. Sleep is only a brief refuge; outside one's body, the world marches on.

Painting by John Collier (1921)

The Secret of a Beautiful Film

2010-10-30T19:01:00.000-07:00

The Secret of Kells (2008)
Film; approx. 75 minutes
Cartoon Saloon
Buena Vista International (Ireland); GKIDS (U.S.); Optimum Releasing (U.K.); Gébéka Films (France)
Starring: Evan McGuire, Brendon Gleeson, Christen Mooney, Mick Lally

I was told The Secret of Kells is an animated film of exceptional beauty. I was unaware that the love and care put into the story were so exceptional, too.

Brendan (Evan McGuire) lives in the Abbey of Kells where his uncle, the demanding Abbot Cellach (Brendon Gleeson), is building a wall to protect the abbey and its inhabitants from the Vikings.

The young Brendan, consequently, has never ventured outside to the forest that surrounds his home.

He finally does on a mission to find ink-making berries for the gold-bound book his kind mentor, Brother Aidan (Mick Lally), wishes to illuminate (or "illustrate"). In the forest, he meets Aisling (Christen Mooney), a young fairy-creature who is brave and cunning but very afraid of a spirit that lurks in the woods.

Kells features forests that look like the stained glass windows of a Gothic church and the style of a Disney cartoon from the Middle Ages.

Each character has round, luminous eyes. Heads are sometimes perfectly symmetrical.

The movement along the backgrounds feels not unlike Richard Williams's The Thief and the Cobbler (1995) while the flat but detailed animation is pretty much Genndy Tartakovky's Samurai Jack (2001-2004). The Vikings and/or Northmen, dark and block-shaped creatures, certainly feel like villains out of Tartakovsky's series.

Aisling, the fairy/faery/sidhe/whatever you want to call her, has movements that are liquid and amazing to look at as she scales trees, jumps, and interacts with the protagonist.

An Irish/Beligan/French production, the world of Kells is lush, detailed, and extraordinary.

Besides the art, the story is touching. Brandan's friendship with Aisling may be important to the film, but how he relates to Abbot Cellach is at the core of it.

They have a tense and wonderfully complicated relationship, nearly as intricate as the designs Brandan creates. This connection between the characters colors the last leg of the film, where both their relationship and the importance of art and beauty in dark times takes center stage.

T he Books of Kells is real, of course, a relic of the ninth century and a fine example of the period's cartography and illustration (or so I've heard).

According to the DVD commentary on The Secret of Kells's U.S. release, the book probably had international influences in its illustrations. This accounts for why some of the monks at the Irish abbey, one of whom is Italian, another black, and a third Asian.

Or perhaps the United Nations look of the abbey is a reference to the difficulty of putting together a film that was animated all over the world. The finances of the movie were reportedly hard to raise. Perhaps the fact this film was made at all only increases its value as a treasure.

So. Is this film good, fun, both, or neither?

It's very good, a triumph of animation and storytelling. Even if cartoons are not your thing, it's hard not to appreciate the effort that went into making this one.

The movie is child-appropriate, but I can't say for sure the extent to which it would interest some children. There are some fun moments and a good deal of adventure, but the movie can be controlled and very restrained.

It feels like it was made with adults and animation students in mind, not explicitly children. The somber ending may be lost on some.

Or perhaps I underestimate kids and adults with short attention spans. They may not look at the composition of each scene with a magnifying glass, but they'll certainly respond to The Secret of Kells's style and beauty.

Holmes and Watson's Excellent Adventure(s)

2010-10-25T18:34:00.000-07:00

Sherlock “A Study in Pink” (2010)

Television; approx. 90 minutes

Hartswood Films; BBC Wales; WGBH

Starring: Benedict Cumberbatch, Martin Freeman

On Sunday, October 24th, I caught PBS's U.S. premiere of Sherlock.

The BBC import is a 21st century update of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's detective that has an unfortunately brief first season of the three episodes. Luckily, it looks like they're also ninety minutes long.

Masterpiece Mystery Theater kicked off the series stateside by airing "A Study in Pink.” Over the pond, it's already out on DVD, and probably the Internet.

The character of Sherlock Holmes pervades pop culture to a frightening extent. He has been reinvented, reused, and confused for a real person. Only last year, Guy Ritchie produced Sherlock Holmes (2009) with a titular character played by Robert Downey, Jr. and a new take on his persona.

Now, is the show’s version of Holmes original? No, but he’s recognizable and fun.

Sherlock's title character is portrayed by actor Benedict Cumberbatch, a man with lips that belong to the statue of a Greek god. No, really, they were a major distraction. Every review I've read online talks about how hilarious Cumberbatch's name is which seems sort of moot when his acting is so convincing and his face is handsomely alien. I suspect he's an extraterrestrial from a gorgeous if strangely proportioned species from another world--a better coiffed world--but that is neither here nor there.

Cumberbatch was in the historical film Amazing Grace (2005) as William Pitt, which is no shock with a face that just doesn't seem to belong to this generation.

His sidekick, Afghanistan veteran Dr. John Watson, is played by Martin Freeman, who was the perfect Arthur Dent for The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (2005). His performance as an average man innocently caught in a chaotic, would-be sci-fi epic was a joy to watch. Now he’s a slightly more-than-average man caught in the world of a super genius.

Freeman’s timing and heart-felt seriousness are all part of the comedy lurking beneath the surface of even the most dramatic moments in Sherlock. Freeman effortlessly plays John Watson as a pleasant everyman with a private taste for daring-do. He's as relatable as Sherlock isn't, the perfect entry character into the world of the show.

Freeman and Cumberbatch's chemistry is excellent, maybe even perfect. Their dynamic is far from sexual or romantic, but they fit together easily. "A Study in Pink" is also a loose re-telling of their first meeting much like "A Study in Scarlet," from Sherlock diagnosing Watson's veteran status from a glance to Watson offering Sherlock an audience the character doesn't know he wanted.

In a memorable scene in the back of a cab, as they pass urban London stores with wasp-wasted mannequins in the windows, Cumberbatch's Holmes describes step-by-step just how he deduced that Watson has recently returned from abroad, is seeing a psychiatrist, and has inherited a phone from an estranged sibling.

Freeman's Watson shares the audience's enjoyment in seeing the method revealed and says that that’s “amazing.” Holmes replies, in a line both hilarious and very sad, that most people just tell him to "piss-off." Their kinship is immediate and believable, the crown jewel of the hour and a half long episode.

This Holmes and Watson are outsiders in the modern world. Their bond is fresh and human. The wonderful connection between the actors, unfortunately, dwarfs the plot of the first episode and many other aspects of the story.

"A Study in Pink" is definitely suspenseful, with a number of supposed suicides around town believed to be the work of a serial killer. The only thing that links them is that they all took the same poison. The explanation behind it all is fun and isn't immediately obvious, but once it reaches its climax (which feels very close to a certain inconceivable scene in The Princess Bride [1987]), the mystery deflates.

Part of the problem is that Cumberbatch's character, during the final third of the premier, momentarily stops being a character and starts being a Crime Solving Machine (TM).

In the recent tradition of quirky, damaged crime show protagonists, as seen in Bones and House, Holmes now cheerfully describes himself as a high functioning sociopath. Misanthropy and super-human intelligence is part of the character, but he's a man, not an action adventure calculator. According to a less savory theme of Sherlock, the reason he solves problems isn't out of glorious human curiosity, but because he is a mechanism more concerned with crime than the victims of it.

Some may argue there isn't much difference. I want to watch a character with a soul, though, not a function. I like cool heroes, too; Robert Downey, Jr.'s take on Holmes was more of a mainstream action man, which is probably why he rubbed some Sherlock purists the wrong way, but unlike Cumberbatch, Downey's character is endearingly friendly and warm. Cumberbatch's character is cold and only relatable when he's playing off Watson.

Considering that this is the first episode, however, it might just be an exaggeration rather than a permanent caricature. The 21st century, for example, certainly has smart phones, texting, and computers that do really cool things, but they are displayed in excess in "A Study in Pink."

I guess the story wants us to know it's conscious of how its source material has been transplanted.

Some nods are made to the devoted Holmes fan base, alive for over a century at this point. I suspect Dr. Watson's frequent pauses as he passes women are almost certainly due to humorous fan speculation that, while far from stated in the text, the character was a womanizer. Perhaps this attention to the fans is why the innuendo of two men living together is discussed so openly.

The producers seem to be in conversation with their audience, not just pandering to them with action adventure tropes. It's one of the saving graces of the show.

The next Sherlock episode, "The Blind Banker," premiers stateside Oct. 31st. Rest assured, I'll be watching eagerly.

Here Kitty, Kitty

2010-10-01T23:31:00.000-07:00

White Cat by Holly Black (2010)
Harper Collins; Hard Cover; 320 pages; ISBN: 978141696397

Like the crime families in White Cat, authors are some of the biggest con artists out there. The audience may be the ones being conned with an exquisitely woven story, but they never get hurt; the characters invariably do.

Holly Black is an exceptional artist and watching her characters undergo hardships is exceptionally rewarding.

Cassel Sharpe begins with being suspended from his boarding school for sleepwalking onto a roof. From a family of con artists, his mother in prison, his brother working for the mafia, and his best friend dead from mysterious circumstances three years ago, he's desperate to get back into the institution as quickly as possible. Cassel excels in pretending to be normal. His problems are confounded, however, by the fantasy elements of the novel.

In the world of White Cat, people known as curse workers can cause luck, change memories, charm people into falling in love by touching other. They compromise a very small percentage of the population, but their effects are widely feared. Everyone wears gloves, an all too understandable attempt at minimizing the danger.

It's a thoughtfully developed world nearly as deceptive as its initially straightforward plot.

The characters and their narrative may appear as sexy and alluring as a an episode of Bones or Sopranos, but the implications and causes of curses can be bleak. Cassel suffers enough being the only non-magic user in a family of curse workers.

Some of Black's twists are clear early on, like the truth behind the secret that motivated our hero to attend boarding school in the first place, but the turns grow deeper and the revelations more satisfying. After the halfway point, it becomes difficult to put the book down and think of anything else besides Cassel, his family, and his cons.

I read Black's Tithe series during my early teens, but the emotional investment I ended up devoting to White Cat still caught me off-guard. Black balances the travails of young adulthood and fantasy beautifully, creating darkly involving characters. She doesn't hesitate to throw in melodrama, but it's never overwhelming.

The largest flaw with the book is it stops too soon, which is just my way of saying that I want to read more. Judging by the title page and addictive characters, it's only the beginning to The Curse Workers series. I get the sense that I haven't finished a book but have read the first part of a much longer story.

So. Is this book good, fun, both, or neither?

A fun fantasy/mystery/thriller fusion executed by one of the most talented YA authors of the past couple decades.

Required reading for crime drama and magic enthusiasts. Yes, both.

Reawakening Pluto

2010-09-28T13:18:00.000-07:00

Pluto by Naoki Urasawa (with Takashi Nagasaki and Osamu Tezuka) (2003-2009)
Viz Media; Trade Paperback; 8 volumes

Osamu Tezuka (1928-1989) has no equal in the U.S. history of animation and comics.

Perhaps Walt Disney comes close, with his empire of squeaky-clean, round eyed characters that had so much influence over the style of modern Japanese anime and manga, but Tezuka wasn't just a figurehead and artist, but a visionary.

He brought quality anime to television and Japanese comics to adults. His massively prolific career has yielded many ambitious manga titles, like Buddha (1972-1983), Adolph (1983-1985), and The Phoenix (1967-1988). He's best remembered for Tetsuwan Atomu (1952-1968) or, to Western audiences, Astro Boy.

A more contemporary manga-ka or comic artist is Naoki Urasawa (1960-present), creator of the award winning Monster (1994-2001). In contrast to Osamu Tezuka, who's mainly known in the U.S. for children's entertainment, Urasawa is known for his dark, morally ambiguous tales.

The news that Naoki Urasawa was re-imagining Astro Boy came as a delightful surprise.

Pluto was made in a joint effort with Takashi Nagasaki and with supervision from Makota Tezuka, Osamu Tezuka's son. The "realistic" art style of Urasawa, where, unlike a lot of anime, characters have wrinkles, individual noses, and eye shapes, reshapes Tezuka's Disney-inspired, cartoon-y characters into the cast of a thrilling, noir detective story.

Someone is killing the world's most prominent robot sympathizers and advanced robots. The murderer always fashions horns for his victims. The only one who powerful enough to kill these people is another robot but, according to the laws of Tezuka's universe, robots don't kill humans.

The main character isn't the sweet-nature robot, Atom--Astro Boy's original name--but the Europol police officer robot, Gesicht. A minor character in the original series, a detective that looks like a middle-aged man is perhaps a more appropriate starting point for a story about death, hatred, and the pointlessness of war.

Gesicht is a dutiful working man, an advanced robot living in a world where many don't recognize artificially intelligent lifeforms as "real people." A sub-plot involves many unsuccessful attempts for him and his wife, Helena, to get some time off from the force and go on a vacation. It's a warmly human example of Urasawa's characterization.

Atom, one of the emotional centers of the story, is introduced in a quiet, memorable scene at the end of the first volume. Taking a break from the dark and mysterious tale of murder, Gesicht heads to Japan where he meets a good-natured school boy that just so happens to be one of the most powerful weapons on Earth. Atom's advanced A.I.--his enjoyment of ice cream when he can't "taste" it, his admiration for a toy he sees outside the window, the fact he goes out of the way to rescue a snail from the rain--comes as a revelation to Gesicht.

It's a poignant and terribly sweet scene in a masterfully crafted story.

Pluto may have cute flourishes from the original Astro Boy series, and even references to other works by Tezuka, but its story is unapologetically mature. Younger anime fans used to uncomplicated high school stories and mecha pilots are in for a challenge. And unlike Death Note, a violent psychological thriller with overall juvenile philosophies, Pluto treats its audiences like adults.

The background of the series involves a war between the United States of Thracia and the Persian Empire of Tezuka's original world. Its images purposely invoke the Gulf War and current situations in Iraq and Afghanistan. The connections can be pretty damning and further enrich an already intriguing story.

So. Is this book good, fun, both, or neither?

It's good.

Very good.

One of the post-scripts describes the series as a treastise by one manga-ka on the work of another. I couldn't agree more. It's an excellent analysis of the characters and their world.

The series treats Tezuka's creations respectfully, too, though they're involved in a very different sort of story.

But it's a heavy work, and no matter how engrossing the art and writing are, the unexpected and heart-wrenching plot twists are brutal.

I couldn't recommend it more.

Surface and Substance in Los Angeles

2010-09-21T12:12:00.000-07:00

The Hanged Man by Francesca Lia Block (1994)
Harper Collins; Trade Paperback; 137 pages; ISBN: 0064408329

Francesca Lia Block's prose walk a thin line between beauty and narcissism.

That's probably because she writes about Los Angeles so much.

Block's prose are gorgeous, slick, and malleable, describing flowers, supermodels, and urban decay in the same line. While I admired her much more as a young teenager, I still respect her craft. Block creates glamorous settings and populates her California landscapes with beautiful, troubled people.

She's F. Scott Fitzgerald filtered through MTV. Sometimes it works, sometimes it's overwrought, but it's always engrossing.

What makes me hesitant to read her work, now, is the same thing that originally drew me to her: her style is often more endearing than her substance.

The Hanged Man is one of Block's darker literary outings. It's less whimsical than the Weetzie books (1989 - 2005) and about on par with her newer book of hers, Wasteland (2003). The plot deals with Laurel, a disturbed teen coming to terms with the death of her father.

Laurel's issues range from melodramatic to painfully real: her friends and family are self-involved and emotionally unavailable, she's sleeping with a man so elusive he may not be real, and she's dealing with an eating disorder that's a symptom of a much larger disease.

It's to Block's credit that she not only juggles these issues well but convincingly. She has a knack for writing soap opera issues like pregnancy and molestation believably, even if they're over-used tropes in fiction like this. But her frankness about sex has always seemed refreshing.

Some readers won't be very enthusiastic about her descriptions of jasmine, oleander, and houses with fairy tale towers.

Your mileage will certainly vary.

My favorite of her books is Baby Be-Bop (1995), a story about a gay California punk coming to terms with his sexuality. Again, the subject matter is melodramatic, but it's saved when the story begins to recount the main character's family tree. Suddenly, the book isn't just about modern Los Angeles, but a multi-textured history, from the life of a miserable seamstress to a happy beatnik couple. The book really moves outside of itself.

While Block loves describing California and is, yes, really quite good at it, I wish she would move out of her comfort zone more often. Hanged Man is far from bad, but with a little more weight, it could have been a lot better.

So. Is this book good, fun, both, or neither?

Every chapter of Hanged Man is centered around a tarot card, though I can't say what this adds to the overall story. It's just another of Block's interests that slides into her work, like Greek mythology, fairy tales, and fashion.

Readers unfamiliar with her work should use what they think of this particular motif to gage their interest in the book.

If you already know you enjoy her writing, though, this is another fun outing, with a deliciously dark, nebulous plot.

Recommendations

2010-09-11T11:50:00.000-07:00

I posted a while back on Lolita and the book covers often chosen to accompany it.

Seems the idea is also interesting to others, specifically the Distressed Watcher over on That Guy With the Glasses. I recommend his video rumination on the covers used to market Vladmir Nobakov's most controversial book and how covers and packaging are used to market media in general.

***

For science-fiction enthusiasts strapped for cash, I suggest The Free SF Reader, a site devoted to finding free fantasy/sci-fi online.

The quality can vary between stories, but it's an excellent way to discover new authors without investing money in fiction you later realize you dislike. Definitely a must for free sample junkies.

***

An old favorite site of mine: SurLaLune Fairy Tales, a good site for fantasy nerds interested in the history behind modern fairy tales. I also suggest following the blog, an excellent resource for products and essays having to do with folklore.

***

The above image is John Maler Collier's Priestess of Delphi. His work has recently been featured on the blog, Underpaintings.

Super-Sized, Super Special Post: Kelly Link

2010-08-23T13:52:00.000-07:00

Stranger Things Happen by Kelly Link (2001)
Small Bear Press; Trade Paperback; 266 pages; ISBN: 1931520003

Pretty Monsters by Kelly Link (2008)
Small Bear Press; Trade Paperback; 389 pages; ISBN: 9780670010905

Kelly Link is a being from outer space. Or beyond.

She comes to Earth, observes the follies of human nature, reads a whole lot of fantasy paperbacks, and writes down her observations. Then she publishes them under Small Bear Press.

Okay, Kelly Link isn't a spectacular alien intelligence from the stars (probably), but, to borrow an over-used-but-in-this-case-completely-deserved adverb, her short fiction is otherworldly.

Some short stories describe other countries, dimensions, and people; Kelly Link's fiction transports you inside the stories themselves. Her prose are completely habitable. Getting lost inside them is easy; I'm sure a reader could sustain himself on Link's elegance for months alone.

I first read Link's collection, Magic For Beginners (2005) several years ago. I was impressed by the parred down prose, the light horror, and fully three-dimensional characters.

Most of all I was completely blown away by how Link could sustain the most ridiculous ideas with realism and humor. A convenience store with zombie patrons? Sure, why not! A house infested by little people that might not be there? Sounds good!

Two stories from this collection, "The Faery Handbag" and the titular "Magic for Beginners," won well-deserved Nebula, Locus, and Hugo awards (yes, all of them) and are re-printed in Link's newest collection for all ages, Pretty Monsters (2008).

I recently decided it was time to read Pretty Monsters and Kelly Link's earliest anthology, Stranger Things Happen (2001) back-to-back in order to book-end the singular experience that was Magic for Beginners.

I discovered two wildly different short story collections deserving of praise, but writing a review where I simply gush about both anthologies wouldn't be entirely fair. In the midst of all that is engrossing about Link's short fiction, there are elements and pieces that are "only okay."

These "okay" works, however, outstrip many a competent author and are only obvious when comparing Link's work to itself.

I think one of the dangers in publishing a collection of fiction written over a long period of time are the conspicuous patterns that emerge. In Stranger Things Happen, main characters, specifically female ones, begin to blend together because, while individual, many appear to be cut from the same cloth.

Rachel Rook, from the memorable piece, "Water Off a Black Dog's Back," is the love interest of Carroll, a young man slowly discovering his lover and her eccentric family may not be as alienating as they appear.

But the stubborn and tight-lipped Rachel bears a striking resemblance to the romantic interest, Serena, in "Survivor's Ball, or, The Donner Party," a story about a young man named Jasper who accidentally crashes a mysterious party at a hotel. The dynamics of Carroll-and-Rachel and Jasper-and-Serena are nearly identical, with young, unsure men chasing after strange, possibly dangerous women.

I'm sure the fact both stories are about horror, paranoia, and the danger of getting to know people further connects them, but it's almost as if they're all aspects of the same people.

Kelly Link's early stories experiment with established mythology and fairy tale canons, showing an author with a knack for magic realism and "literary" fantasy still trying to find her voice. Stranger Things Happen bristles with strong and unsure characters who are often more comfortable in our world than a fairy tale one.

"Travels with the Snow Queen" is a re-telling of the Hans Christian Anderson tale about a girl trying to retrieve a boy from the clutches of a snow deity. The story quickly becomes an very obvious metaphor for problematic relationships.

"Flying Lessons," similarly, takes motifs, gods, and stories from Greek mythology and fuses them into the life of a young girl. Both work, for the most part, even if it feels uneven.

"The Girl Detective" doesn't. The story has great moments, especially when it becomes a re-telling of the fairy tale, The Twelve Dancing Princesses. It's also meant as an exploration of the "girl detective" trope in fiction, but only serves to describe a hollow, lifeless character. Unlike Link's other stories, where mystery provides a haunting atmosphere, this piece is just too vague to be palatable. Perhaps it's also weakened by being last and somewhat unremarkable in a very strong collection.

The best stories include "Louise's Ghost," a supernatural look at an intense friendship between two women named Louise, and "Shoe and Marriage," three inter-connected micro pieces that deal with married life, dictators, and a beauty pageant in the middle of Armageddon. Both works show Link's wonderful talent of fusing human fear and fantasy.

Among her most haunting stories, though, is "Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose," a character study of a man who can’t remember his own wife’s name. He’s not even completely sure how he ended up at the hotel where he’s staying.

How does it end?

It doesn’t. A lot of Link’s early stories don’t end. Her short pieces are complete entities that often skip explanations.

Kelly Link is one of the rare authors who can write an ambiguous ending that doesn’t feel like it’s cheating the reader. In both Stranger Things Happen and Magic for Beginners, she leans heavily on ambiguity for dramatic effect. It works because the characters are so strong, if similar, it feels like they'll outlive the story.

In her newest collection, Pretty Monsters, Link tones this down. Most of the endings are fairly straightforward. This might be because Link is more sure about her craft or it maybe because this particular book is aimed at adolescents.

All of the short stories in Pretty Monsters have children and young adults as the main characters, with themes like growing up and change quietly sneaking in the background. I would even say they’re stories attempting to converse with adolescent culture.

"The Wrong Grave," where a heartbroken poet tries to dig up his dead girlfriend, and title story, "Pretty Monsters," an interweaving of two seemingly unrelated accounts of monstrous teen girls, seem to be a response to the recent resurgence of teen-aimed gothic or “romantic horror” fiction. They’re not exactly part of the trend, but an exploration of why the light horror elements are so appealing.

"The Wizards of Perfil," one of the most memorable stories, seems like a tribute to Harry Potter and teenage-chosen-one fiction. The twist here is that the teens in question are being brought to a swamp in order to be the servants of the wizards in question.

Besides three stories, Pretty Monsters is almost exclusively about teen girls dealing with problems which, though intriguing, get repetitive. This imbalance is remedied with "Monster," a story of a boy, James Lorbick, trapped in a summer camp straight out of a horror movie, and "The Surfer," about a boy, Adorno, trapped in Costa Rica at an airport during a flu outbreak. Unlike a couple of the fun but somewhat interchangeable characters in Stranger Things Happen, James and Adorno are distinct.

"The Surfer"’s not too distant future setting of plague/flue outbreaks and a third-world United States appear to be built from headlines about swine flu and the terrible economy. In a lot of ways, it already feels dated. Characters as strong as Adorno, a teenage soccer player focused on going pro and unworried by alien-worshipping cult nudists, carry the story wonderfully.

It would be the strongest story in this tight collection if "Magic for Beginners," from Link’s middle anthology, wasn’t re-printed with the rest of the stories.

"Magic for Beginners," where Jeremy Mars obsesses about the best show in the universe, got me into Kelly Link. It convinced me she was far more special than most authors out there.

It's the sort of story that’s so well drawn, it could have been a full-length novel, but doesn’t need to be. It’s perfect the way it is––amusing, gentle, and fantastical while remaining firmly rooted in reality. It’s the perfect balance of Link’s trademark ambiguity and her honest depiction of human fear and love. Saying much else about it would ruin the well-crafted twists and surprises.

The short story also shows that Link’s middle collection is still the best of the lot, even if Stranger Things Happen and Pretty Monsters are well worth every word.

I’m passionate about Kelly Link. If she never publishes anything again, I would be miserable, but satisfied that at least she’s given the world these remarkable books.

So. Is this book good, fun, both, or neither?

Both.

Now go get reading.

Traveling Without Going Anywhere: A Passage to India

2010-08-01T09:18:00.000-07:00

A Passage to India by E.M. Forster (1924)
Harcourt; Trade Paperback; 362 pages; ISBN: 0156711427

A Passage to India is a thoughtful meditation on the problems of imperialism and race relations, especially for its time.

E.M. Forster’s most famous work, Howard's End, was also revolutionary for its day, a piece of fiction that explored the difficulties between classes and the impossibility of moving up in the world, especially, of all places, Edwardian England.

Passage, published some years later, left England for more exotic shores.

Just as Howard's End explored the friction between wealthy British men and the impoverished, this novel pulls the reader right into a clash of cultures. The reader is treated to hypocritical, bigoted Anglo-Indians (colonials) who are faithful to their own culture even if they can't be bothered with that of the country where they live. Indians within the novel are often more sympathetic and human, but are still criticized for a flawed social structure.

No one is ever completely right in Forster's work nor completely wrong. The ambiguity is to the author's credit.

As the particularly eccentric character Mr. Godbole comments, "When evil occurs, it expresses the whole of the universe. Similarly when good occurs."

The "evil" of the novel, much like the good, concerns the events leading up to, and the eventual result, of a young English woman, Adela Quested, accusing the respectable Dr. Aziz of attempted rape.

Aziz is the closest the novel has to a main character, as the story begins and ends from his point-of-view. He is impatient, if friendly and harmless. His good nature manifests itself when the other two main characters of the novel, Mrs. Moore and Cecil Fielding, are present. They represent an England that has been taken out of its element. Moore and Fielding enjoy aspects of India, but like Adela Quested, eventually realize their true place in the world is elsewhere no matter their enjoyment of Aziz’s country.

The novel doesn't give an answer to the cultural conflict between India and England, mostly because it was published a couple decades before Indian independence, and it shouldn't. Forster doesn't just triumph with his characters but his impartiality. His novel isn't a portrait of a solution, but a place (the fictional Chandrapore) within a broader world (the not-at-all-fictional India).

Reading Passage to India is like leaving for a trip. You'll never feel exactly at home, especially if you were raised during the latter half of the 20th century, but you'll be happy for going on the journey.

Saying that, it's also a real journey to get to the meat of the story. Published in the mid-1920's, the novel shows its age by the amount of time it takes to find the plot. Most of the novel is spent exploring the complexity of basic communication between cultures.

Everyday conflicts between an Indian doctor having to deal with British superiors, not to mention the alienaton between English tourists and English colonists, are all brought up before the main conflict of Adela Quested's alleged assault even takes place. For impatient readers, it can be a trial to get through, and I would recommend starting with Howard's End before tackling its successor.

So, is this book good, fun, both, or neither?

Better than good–it's brilliant. The fun is intellectual but ultimately satisfying.

E.M. Forster work always seems to be worth the time spent reading it, however, turning a story into an experience. A Passage to India certainly takes readers somewhere different and, hopefully, makes them more thoughtful for their trouble.

Current Cinema: El secreto de sus ojos, Splice, and Toy Story 3

2010-06-24T04:00:00.000-07:00

Toy Story 3 (2010)
Director: Lee Unkrich
Cast: Tom Hanks, Tim Allen, John Morris, and Ned Beatty
Writers: Michael Arndt, John Lasseter, Andrew Stanton, and Lee Unkrich
Other: Animated, Comedy/Drama, Kids
Grade: A

Pixar may be renowned for bringing computer animation into mainstream film with Toy Story back in 1995, but the company has mainly done well because of its stories.

Toy Story 3 succeeds because, once it conjures all of the nostalgia from its predecessors, it hits you with the awful truth that was always lurking behind the first two films:

Now that Andy (John Morris), who owned the living toys in the first two films, is about to go to college, he has to get rid of them as he cleans out his room. Woody (Tom Hanks) and Buzz (Tim Allen), who are practically mascots of Pixar, are suddenly, nakedly disposable.

The film goes into some very dark territory despite being one of the most visually sumptuous and playful of Pixar's full-length features to date. Sunnyside Daycare, where the toys are initially sent, is filled with bright color and varied textures unseen in the previous films. The detail within the nursery is extensive and pure eye candy.

The original Toy Story mainly played with light. The limited technology of the time may be the reason why the writers decided to focus on toys rather than jerky, uncanny valley humans. The first film, though, was still able to give us the hellish bedroom of Sid, the evil next door neighbor who makes a brief cameo as a garbage man (note the skull shirt) in the most recent installment.

The neon and plush toddler toys at Sunnyside are ruled by a stuffed bear, Lotso (Ned Beatty). Even young children (one of whom I went with to see this film for the second time) should pick up on the fact he's the villain by his entrance alone. Beyond this, the film spends very little time pandering to its target audience.

In one scene, when the toys discover their fate is finally out of their hands, they have nothing to do but wait for the inevitable. It's an adult moment in a film intended for not only today's children but those who grew up with this trilogy. The scene is not about the beautiful animation Toy Story 3 offers; it's about the affecting story behind it.

Regardless of whether or not you grew up with the films, I think Toy Story 3 is probably going to be one of the strongest films in theaters this year. It will definitely net Pixar a few more awards.

But what should the company do next?

The opening short to the film is called Day and Night where 2-D animation is effectively married to the usual computer generated fare. I wouldn't mind seeing Pixar have a go at a full 2-D animated feature, just to prove it can make an effective story no matter the format.

***

El secreto de sus ojos (The Secret in Their Eyes) (2009/2010)
Director: Juan José Campanella
Writers: Juan José Campanella, Eduardo Sacheri
Cast: Soledad Villamil, Ricardo Darín, Carla Quevedo, Pablo Rago, and Javier Godino
Other: Subtitled, Spanish; Crime drama
Grade: B+

We open with a writer.

He is trying to write something very important, but the words aren't coming out right. He throws out notebook pages and scratches out entire paragraphs.

In his mind, Benjamín Esposito (Ricardo Darín) sees a woman running along a train and a man looking out the window after her as he leaves the station.

Is it fiction? A memory? If it's a memory, whose is it?

It's a killer opening to a good story.

Most of The Secret in Their Eyes takes place in flashback as Darín's character struggles to remember the details surrounding the brutal rape of a banker's wife in 1970's Argentina.

He is aided in his investigation by his office crush, Irene Menéndez-Hastings (Soledad Villamil), an Ivy League lawyer who longs to bring the criminal to justice. Both actors have an excellent chemistry that does not get in the way of their hard boiled detective work in the past.

In the present, their emotional connection becomes the calm center of a violent tale.

Years later, Benjamín meets with the much older Irene while he tries to turn the events surrounding the crime into a novel. The complex tale is sometimes sprawling in its cast and setting and is sometimes focused sharply on mundane, ordinary things that turn out to be of key importance to the story.

I usually avoid stories about writer's writing, as they often feel self-referential, but Benjamín's novel is secondary to the action of the world around him. The novel is his attempt at excorcising a particularly nasty string of events from his mind.

The subtitled film is beautifully shot and has brilliant moments of interaction between the characters. There are scenes where the movie drags, though, like a particularly labored episode of Law and Order, but when it's good, it's perfect.

Details of the 1970's–soccer matches, the politcal climate–warm the film up from a cold, violent mystery into an engaging period piece. The final act turns the movie on its head, transforming the story into something more affecting than a struggling writer trying to find the right words.

***

Splice (2010)

Director: Vincenzo Natali
Writers: Vincenzo Natali, Antoinette Terry Bryant, and Doug Taylor
Cast: Adrien Brody, Sarah Polley, and Delphine Chanéac
Other: Sci-fi, Drama
Grade: B

Creature features tend to be cautionary tales: "Don't fuck with science because it will fuck with you." Splice exploits common and misunderstood fears of cloning and stem cell research into an effective story, at least.

Our heroes are Adrien Brody and Sarah Polley, a scientist power couple. Their discoveries include slug-hybrids which make moist, gushing sounds whenever on-screen.

"NO GOOD CAN COME FROM THIS," the film all but screams.

In their world, I guess Brody and Polley are so hip and cool, they hang posters of anime characters on their walls, listen to heavy metal and jazz, and have made it onto the cover of Wired. These character flourishes confirm that Brody and Polley's characters, despite their breakthroughs, still have a very juvenile attitude toward life.

Their teenage passions are challenged when they introduce a third character into their life, a creature far more complex than a meaty, gooshy slug.

Mushed together from human and animal DNA, the CG and puppet rendered monster is a lovely young woman with a bisected head, goat legs, and a tail. It grows quickly, a child maturing into the attractive Delphine Chanéac.

Dren, as they name the creature, becomes resentful of her adoptive parents, who lock her away from the world.

Splice's careful sci-fi family drama falls apart in its third act as it becomes the very creep-fest its posters promise. There are some clunky lines, too, that become far more jarring as the film draws to a close.

The thoughtful, strong, and emotional build-up in the first two-thirds of the movie are worth the price of admission, earning an "A" where the last fifteen plus minutes of the film earn a "D."

Brody, Polley, and Chanéac give excellent performances, even if they're stuck in a world where scientific advancements only mean trouble.

(My full review of Splice is available at Vivacious Kids! It's a cool blog! Go check it out!)

Huckleberry Finn Fans Forget to Read Their Source Material

2010-06-14T13:07:00.000-07:00

Found at StarTribune.com, a tale of why fiction and reality are very separate things:

"Dreaming of a Huck Finn-style adventure on the Mississippi, a young couple are instead afoul of the law."

Claire Boucher and William Gratz had their sights set on the southern reaches of the Mississippi River when they packed their chickens, a sewing machine and 20 pounds of potatoes into a houseboat they crafted from scratch.

[...]

Strangers gave them bikes, a mattress and the sewing machine (powered by on-board batteries). They got a copy of Mark Twain's "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn," which neither of them had read.

Reading doesn't inspire bad ideas, at least not when people are so good at coming up with them on their own. I wonder if they thought the original text had something to do with chickens and potatoes? And I just can't place the sewing machine.

But I guess they get a couple literacy points for naming their boat, which now "rests next to burned-up and smashed car carcasses," after Daniel Clowes's surreal graphic novel, Like a Velvet Glove Cast in Iron. The comic is a good read, but I don't think snuff films have much to do with boating down the Mississippi.

One of my favorite parts of the article involves park police officer Rob Mooney who tried to convince the couple to buy "life jackets, paddles and other supplies" when he first found them. I think it's pretty obvious they didn't do much research before their journey. A week later, he returned to give them "citations for camping and alcohol consumption in the park." He actually seems pretty sorry about having to do it:

"I love the idea of the Tom Sawyer adventure," Mooney said. "The problem is it's not 1883. You can't do that anymore. You have to follow the rules."

All I have to say is follow your dreams, kids, but not when it means breaking the law over getting drunk on a homemade boat.

Tender Issues: Patriarchy, Domestic Abuse, and Fantasy

2010-06-13T19:44:00.000-07:00

Tender Morsels by Margo Lanagan (2008)
Knopf; Trade Paperback; 436 pages; ISBN: 0375843051

Tender Morsels, an adaptation of the fairy tale Snow White and Rose Red, begins with fifty or so pages depicting domestic abuse.1

And shockingly, it's a wonderful read.

The story begins with a young girl, Liga, as she endures molestation by her father, resulting in several unwanted pregnancies. The depiction of her isolation and emotional state are bleak but affecting. The audience is never exposed to the more unsavory details of Liga's traumas, which is perhaps why the scenes are never as off-putting as they could be.

We are right there with Liga when she resists her father's urgings to abort her most recent pregnancy. Her logic, in this pre-industrial, superstitious world, is oddly sound: she wants the companionship of a child. Liga's father soon perishes, allowing the girl to have her child, but she is abused yet again by a band of vicious boys from her village, resulting in both another pregnancy and her departure into another world, a personal heaven/fantasy land bestowed on her by a benevolent force of some sort.

Which is where the story of Liga's daughters, Branza (Snow White) and Urdda (Rose Red) begins. Unknowingly, they grow up in their mother's idea of a perfect world, where villagers are friendly automatons, poverty is non-existent, and men don't abuse women. The elder Branza is content but Urdda, correctly, suspects there is something beyond this oddly bland reality. Her suspicions are proven sound when men and bears from the real world begin to intrude on Liga's personal heaven, soon forcing all three women back into reality.

Whew. That's a lot, isn't it?

Tender Morsels is a tough book to digest only because of its subject matter. Thankfully, the drama never overwhelms the text. The language, where characters refer to children as "babbies" and the character voices are individual and involving, flows smoothly.

Liga's abuse isn't utilized to force tears out of the reader but to develop the world around her. Fantasy narratives, especially those set in time periods resembling the dark ages, often sidestep the question of gender divides in a patriarchal society. Tender Morsels turns the question of gender into one of its central themes.

Urdda, the younger and often more adventurous sister, eventually uncovers her mother's sad past:

If this crime against Mam had gone unpunished, who knew what else had been done? If no one spoke of this, from guilt among the men themselves, from distaste and fear on Mam's part, who knew what other secrets bubbled here? The whole town, the whole world, was fouled by this, was made unclean, to Urdda's mind. (Lanagan 388)

Zelazny's Lord of Light deconstructs the power of religion just as Lanagan indicates the stifling history of patriarchy. The commentary is unsparing

But the story is too well written to preach. The unsavory sides of a male-dominated society do not force the story into having a moral. Instead, Liga, now older and removed from her father's influence, must realize that hiding away from the real world has caused perhaps more harm than she intended. Slipping into a fantasy realm has saved her from abuse but has also sheltered her and her daughters from experience.

Perhaps this theme of reaching adulthood through experience explains why the book was marketed to general audiences in Australia but labeled for young adults in the U.S. Every character has to learn how to grow-up and adjust to the real world.

So, is this book good, fun, both, or neither?

While it's not very fun to begin a story where the main character is being abused, the language is a joy to read. I often steer clear of fiction built around domestic violence, as such books often come off as exploitative, but the author keeps descriptions light and her focus steady. As the audience, we know things will get better. One need not stretch their patience very far for the narrative to brighten up considerably.

Saying this, however, the first fifty pages are so well written, they often overshadow the rest of the book. The adventures of Liga's daughters, Branza and Urdda, as well as their interactions with bears and witches, are somehow flat in comparison to the first section of the story.

When the three women leave their heavenly home in order to return to reality, the conflict begins anew as they try to acclimate to the world around them. Beyond a chilling climax, though, the story continues to lose steam until its finale. Perhaps some passages could have been cut or some pacing issues could have been solved before release.

Reaching the ending remains deeply satisfying. I highly recommend it to audiences who enjoy revisions of fairy tales and fantasy fiction.

The Lolita Cover-Up

2010-05-26T13:14:00.000-07:00

What the hell is up with covers for Lolita?

In Nabokov's beautifully written novel, a middle-aged narrator whose name might be Humbert Humbert (very important: everything is from his perspective) recalls his lust for a young girl. He goes as far as to marry the teen's mother in order to get close to her.

But the audience is meant to recognize the fact that Humbert has fallen in love with the image of a young girl and not an actual person.

So why do most covers for this book promote Humbert's version of the character? Why does the quote from Vanity Fair on the black and white cover above claim Nabokov's narrative is "the only convincing love story of our century?" I hope the writer who gave that quote meant "convincing" in the sense that Humbert is truly in love with his own idea of Lolita. Maybe Vanity Fair was just trying to be edgy.

Also, a quick note: to those familiar with Japanese fashion, Lolita is a fashion movement where women dress in exaggerated, Victorian-inspired frills, bows, bloomers, and (often) long sleeves. While Japan has a long history of finding sexual appeal in innocence and youth, its appropriation of the "Lolita" idea is very broad in this case.

Anyway, covers to books can often be misleading (or even hilariously bad), but a number of covers for Lolita side with Humbert from the beginning. This is deeply troubling if only because a successful cover tells the reader what the story is about rather than broadcasting a preconceived notion of characters.

Take a look at this gallery on Flickr. How many of these interpretations for Lolita, while very well done, reference the fact she's actually being objectified? Some of these covers show a young woman aware of her sexuality and in control of it, which is definitely Humbert's view the character. Very few covers portray a victimized girl being controlled. Most are ambiguous.

Lolita is famously recognized as a book about "forbidden love" (ugh) or pornography. The reality is that it contains no explicit sex scenes. Vladmir Nobokav's book is porn if your kink is flowery descriptions, well rendered prose, and unattainable ideals, I guess. It sort of reminds me of Rose Stanley in Muriel Spark's The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, a supporting character who, the audience is told, is "famous for sex," but is revealed to be relatively innocent.

Lolita, the very few times the character emerges from Humbert's definition of her and when she becomes human, is shown to be fairly detestable. When not enraptured by her image, Humbert explains to the audience that she is a tease, temperamental, and childish.

Which I guess is pretty shocking to him what with her being a child, and all.

These descriptions feed into the idea that Lolita is sexually active because she is spoiled. Humbert, in showing that she does not meet his ideal and is in fact very flawed, lessens his crime. In his eyes, she is goading him into sleeping with her.

But this is his perspective of the events and not the only perspective with which one can read the book.

Humbert is delusional. He portrays himself as a suave foreigner and the women who do not meet his standards as fools or idiots. He describes Lolita's mother as an "old lady," but is this because she's actually old or because she's his idea of old?

In the memoir, Reading Lolita in Tehran, author Azar Nafisi writes about an Iranian student's feelings toward the book:

'[S]ome critics seem to treat the text the same way Humbert treats Lolita: they only see themselves and what they want to see.' She turned to me and continued: 'I mean, the censors, or some of [Iran's] politicized critics, don't they do the same thing, cutting up books and re-creating them in their own image? What Ayatollah Khomeini tried to do to our lives, turning us, as you said, into figments of his imagination, he also did to our fiction. Look at Salman Rushdie's case [regarding The Satanic Verses].' (Nafisi 50)

Humbert's voice is so persuasive in objectifying the titular character, audiences and illustrators forget Lolita is his victim. Sexualizing the character in cover art plays into Humbert's vision of her. I suppose it can be argued, though, that some of the book covers depict Lolita as a sexual being on purpose.

The narrator's pedophilia (which he carefully replaces with the phrase, "obsession with nymphets") is what makes the story so intriguing. Yet the book is still about a man who, aided by his inner demons, takes away the childhood of a young girl by committing statutory rape and turning her into an object. Nobokov's genius is that he makes this supremely horrible human being into a sympathetic figure.

Part of the story is how the narrator manipulates the reader into taking his side of the situation. Lolita, after all, doesn't have a voice. The character is never not defined by Humbert. We often see her as a willing accomplice to Humbert's imagination because he's the one telling the story.

When a reader or artist completely agrees with Humbert's perspective, he or she falls into a carefully laid trap.

I'm sure I've ranted about this subject another time and on another blog in the past, but every time I see the image at the top of this entry I am reminded again of how misleading cover illustrations can be. The image shows a girl with very adult legs, her shoes innocent and nostalgic of another era but her skirt at a height that tells readers she does not desire to be innocent at all.

But this is Humbert's desire, not Lolita's.

Hindu Gods Rule the Stars

2010-05-24T08:51:00.000-07:00

Lord of Light (1968)
Eos; Trade Paperback; 279 pages; IBSN: 0380014033

I have usually kept to reading science fiction titles, and sometimes fiction in general, published from the 1970’s to present day. It’s a cruel set of standards, but some entertainment just doesn’t hold up with age.

Roger Zelzany’s Lord of Light, however, doesn't seem to belong to any age, combing a purposely antiquated voice with pared down text. It could have easily been a bestselling book in the past decade rather than a Hugo award-winning book of 1968.

Lord of Light is about faux Hindu gods ruling an alien world. Humans have long ago left behind Earth, referred to as “Urth” or “Urtha.” We’re never given the exact number of years that have elapsed since this mass exodus, giving the narrative a frighteningly vast feel.

The planet described is ruled by small number of humans who, through a sort of “reincarnating” technology which allows them to switch into new bodies once they become too old, have imitated the Hindu gods for centuries through various avatars. Kali, Vishnu, Brahma, and other deities have all been appropriated, their original human names dropped casually into the text not more than a few times (i.e. Madeline, Candi). Through these divine personas, and in a sly commentary on organized religion, these gods slow down technological development among humans in order to remain in power.

Except for Sam, the amoral hero of the narrative, who is known as Mahasamatman or Buddha to his followers. Beginning with Sam’s reincarnation, most of Lord of Light is in flashback. The book details his rebellion against the major gods who live in Heaven (several mountaintops that have been flattened and fused together) in order to set the world right for the rest of the humans.

Rating:

So. Is this book good, fun, both, or neither?

A good book, at its best, reframes the world and returns to the reader’s thoughts days after he or she has put down the text in question. A fun book, on the other hand, is just an escape hatch from the world. And yes, “fun” and “good” can be the same thing.

A good, solid book.

Despite the lag of exposition, the writing style is air tight and straight forward. The characters are morally complex, like Sam, who’s driven mainly by guilt to assume the role of the pure figure of the Buddha, or Yama whose story is analyzed in depth over at i09. It deserves to be reread often and is definitely the sort of sci-fi I wouldn’t mind seeing taught in college courses.

As for “fun,” while I trudged through the first chapter and the world building, this feeling of tediousness was admittedly brief. Once the story really began, it was difficult not to get sucked into the action. The plot even transforms into a detective story for a little while with Yama attempting to solve a murder mystery in Heaven.

Definitely recommended, either for the casual reader looking for something new or the sci-fi enthusiast who hasn’t quite gotten to this title yet if, like me, they're biased toward fiction published in the last decade or so.

Eat Your Cake

2010-05-16T17:26:00.000-07:00

Cake made by: A Couple of Sweet Things

WARNING: Regardless of its name, this blog does not recommend one to literally "eat your books" as books are traditionally made from materials which aren't very tasty. Unless you like eating paper. (Some do.)

However, if your books are made out of delicious cake, by all means, go ahead!

(Thanks Cake Wrecks!)

Further Adventures from my Bookshelf

2010-05-14T11:38:00.000-07:00

By revealing to someone what you haven't read (yet), you are always in grave danger of revealing your ignorance.

Then again, I try not to pretend I'm something other than I'm not, and a book hoarder isn't the worst thing in the world, right?

("Right," everyone says, nodding in approval. "You are obviously intelligent and cool and not at all talking to yourself by writing this.")

So, here's more of my literary to-do list!

Artemis Fowl by Eoin Colfer
Purchased at a thrift store on a friend's recommendation. It will be read, don't worry; it's aimed at a YA audience, it looks short, and it looks fun.

The Yacoubian Building by Alaa Al Aswany
Egyptian literature! (This was a gift and certainly a good one; might be read soon.)

The Death of Vishnu by Manil Suri
Published with an eerily similar cover to The Yacoubian Building. I know I bought this because a professor recommended it to me sophomore year but I have no recollection of finishing it!

The Hounds of the Morrigan by Pat O'Shea
Like Artemis Fowl, this one is YA. It was definitely purchased because of the cover. I mean, look at it! Isn't that a neat illustration? It's probably from a famous painting I know nothing about. Not Frazetta, but very nice to look at.

Fantasy Stories Chosen by Diana Wynne Jones
Purchased at used bookstore. I despaired when I arrived home and realized it was a book of stories chosen by Jones, not be her. I was blinded by literary lust, no doubt!

Not Satanism but Transformation

2010-05-14T11:30:00.000-07:00

The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie (1988)
Random House; Trade Paperback; 561 pages; ISBN: 0812976717

Two men fall out of the sky from a hijacked plane that explodes over England. The men are the optimistic Bollywood actor, Gibreel Farishta, and the far grumpier India-to-Britain transplant, Saladin Chamcha, a voice actor whose identity remains mostly unknown to his Western audience.

Instead of plummeting to their doom, the men fly.

A beautifully written narrative unfolds from there, chronicling each actor’s attempt to acclimate to Britain after this experience. Rushdie’s rambling, warm voice keeps the characters and events interesting whether he’s writing about saints or Satan.

Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses, like The Devil’s Arithmetic and The Screwtape Letters, has a title that incites many potential readers to say (or think), “Oh yes, that sounds really scary, maybe I’ll read that later,” knowing from public knowledge that there is something infamous attached to the book in question but unsure what exactly that is.

The reputation of Rushdie’s Satanic Verses has less to do with its title than the fatwah issued against it by Ayatollah Khomeini is 1989. The ban has survived for quite a long time despite Khomeini’s death and the accepting attitude of certain individuals in Muslim nations, but it remains none-the-less, overshadowing more important themes of immigration and forgiveness. In many ways, author Salman Rushdie’s career has been overshadowed as well. After reading the book cover to cover, I wonder if Khomeini feared the book’s exploration of the West more than its dissection of the Koran.

Parallel tales run along the main story, including an ill-fated pilgrimage that openly questions the validity of faith and a city where a whorehouse has prostitutes that model themselves after Mohammed’s wives. If Rushdie’s intent was to stir up a little controversy over two decades ago, his only crime is he succeeded far too well.

The novel’s main focus is on nationality and identity. The novel explores whether Saladin’s British wife and career mean he is no longer Indian or whether Gibreel’s good fortune means causing others harm. Religion and the questioning of it certainly makes up a good part of the novel, but in many ways it’s a red herring in finding the purpose of the narrative. Saladin and Gibreel are on an odyssey of self-discovery more than anything else, even when one man transforms into a demon (shaytan) and the other an angel.

“That sounds like a very nice book,” you are probably saying to yourself. (Or maybe you are thinking that it sounds dreadful; I can’t tell.) “But isn’t this a review? What do you think of it?”

Well, I think a lot of things about the story and its analysis of the intersection between Eastern and Western cultures, but I fear I would mostly end up repeating much of the book verbatim and that certainly isn’t what a blog review should be about.

Instead I’ll give it a

Rating:

So. Is this book good, fun, both, or neither?

A good book, at its best, reframes the world and returns to the reader’s thoughts days after he or she has put down the text in question. A good book can still be “fun” but in an academic and challenging sense. The journey isn’t always viscerally pleasant, but it’s a healthy dose of literature, reality, or sense.

A fun book, on the other hand, is, at its best, an escape hatch from the world. It’s dessert before dinner or ice cream for breakfast. It doesn’t have to be believable, just convincing. A fun book is “good” in the sense that it successfully transports you to an imaginary vacation spot where thinking is often largely optional.

And yes, “fun” and “good” can be the same thing.

What is The Satanic Verses, exactly?

In one scene, one of Rushdie’s heroes attempts to come up with a philosophy to explain the recent twists in his life. “Maybe unhappiness is the continuum through which the human life moves, and joy just a series of blips, of islands in the stream,” Saladin thinks to himself (Rushdie 531). The book quickly moves on to other subjects, being the far-reaching, thoroughly populated odyssey Rushdie likes to write (if Midnight’s Children is any indication).

The above line remained with me through the rest of the text, though. Rushdie and the reader see one unhappiness after another: suicide, the dissolution of marriage, and unforgivable crimes. Gibreel and Saladin may survive falling out of the sky, but that’s only the beginning of their troubles. Literature isn’t very compelling without conflict, though, and the characters always suffer for a (sometimes self-inflicted) reason.

Tragic events in the novel are contrasted with “islands in the stream” that make certain quiet moments all the more satisfying to read:

A heartless bussinessman has a secret passion for carpentry.

A hospital filled with dehumanized but fantastical patients makes an escape for the real world.

A father and son finally form a loving paternal relationship while one is on his deathbed.

These moments stand out brilliantly in the otherwise bleak setting of the narrative where foreigners are terrorized for being different and religion may very well be a sham. It’s a good book, but a reader must be prepared to work for satisfaction. Gratification and contentment, the book indicates, does not just fall from the sky.

Explorations of My Bookshelf

2010-05-07T19:28:00.001-07:00

Some readers refuse to buy another book before they finish what they have. I am not one of these readers.

This is one of the reasons I think reading is a lot like eating. Some of us, like myself, are just gluttons.

A sampling of books from my shelf that I have either not read or have not (yet) finished.

Dandelion Wine by Ray Bradbury
Sort of a short story collection/memoir. I read the first story and found it, as usual with Bradbury, very sentimental. But hmm. I bought this. When did I buy this?

Lord of Light by Roger Zelazny
Man, I don't remember buying this one either. What the hell. Did I buy it because the summary on the back is so cool? Because it's very cool.

Earth is long since dead. On a colony planet, a band of men has gained control of technology, made themselves immortal, and now rule their world as the gods of the Hindu pantheon.

Dreamcatcher by Stephen King
I remember watching the trailer for the film adaptation. Not exactly sure how this ended up on my shelf?

Princess Nevermore by Dian Curtis Regan
I remember this book! Oh! Oh! It has a cool idea, it's Young Adult, it's got a princess and an underworld...and...and INeverFinishedItWhoops.

The Love Poems of Lord Byron: A Romantic's Passion
Byron's poetry is neat. The details of his life, on the other hand, are hilarious. Maybe I was disappointed his poems didn't have more pregnant teenagers?

Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert A. Heinlein
Yes, there are sci-fi fans (or, well, people who consider themselves sci-fi fans) who haven't read this book. Anyway, space hippies and the prologue sounded promising; it was bought.