Novel Eye

2011-04-16T04:09:00.001-04:00

Ah, Philip Larkin. Being shown Larkin in college was revelatory for me. I wrote my final paper on his poetry. Looking at it now I can see both what appealed to me then, but I can also see how amazing his writing is, what depths can be discovered. I think that I found him to be a bridge between the formal poetry of the past and the themes that would come to dominate poetry in the late 50's and 60's in free verse.
Larkin was a bitter and cynical man and his poems reflect a very post-war, British sensibility of austerity and change (in my American eyes). And while his poems reflect that cynicism, it is interesting to me that he was still able to produce this body of work--that nihilism and pessimism did not stop him from the need to write. Like Dorothy Parker, he flirted with suicide, wrote of it as a desirable thing, and yet staggered on creating.

This is probably his most famous poem.

This Be the Verse
~Philip Larkin

They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.

But they were fucked up in their turn
By fools in old-style hats and coats,
Who half the time were soppy-stern
And half at one another's throats.

Man hands on misery to man.
It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can,
And don't have any kids yourself.

April, 1971

***

And a much earlier one

'Since the majority of me'

Since the majority of me
Rejectts the majority of you,
Debating ends forthwith, and we
Divide. And sure of what to do

We disinfect new blocks of days
For our majorities to rent
With unshared friends and unwalked ways.
But silence too is eloquent:

A silence of minorities
That, unopposed at last, return
Each night with cancelled promises
That want renewed. They never learn

December 6, 1950

Poems for National Poetry Month

2011-04-05T15:56:00.007-04:00

Kid

~Simon Armitage

Batman, big shot, when you gave the order

to grow up, then let me loose to wander

leeward, freely through the wild blue yonder

as you liked to say, or ditched me rather,

in the gutter…well, I turned the corner.

Now I’ve scotched that ‘he was like a father

to me’ rumour, sacked it, blown the cover

on that ‘he was like an elder brother’

story, let the cat out on the caper

with the married woman, how you took her

downtown on expenses in the motor.

Holy robin-redbreast-nest-egg shocker!

Holy roll-me-over-in-the-clover,

I’m not playing ball boy any longer

Batman, now I’ve doffed that off-the-shoulder

Sherwood-Forest-green and scarlet number

for a pair of jeans and crew-neck jumper;

now I’m taller, harder, stronger, older.

Batman, it makes a marvelous picture:

you without a shadow, stewing over

chicken giblets in the pressure cooker,

next to nothing in the walk-in larder,

punching the palm of your hand all winter,

you baby, now I’m the real boy wonder.

On Being a Woman

~Dorothy Parker

Why is it, when I am in Rome

I'd give an eye to be at home,

But when on native earth I be,

My soul is sick for Italy?

And why with you, my love, my lord,

Am I spectacularly bored,

Yet do you up and leave me--then

I scream to have you back again?

Review of the two versions of Frankenstein

2011-04-05T15:47:00.003-04:00

Benedict Cumberbatch as the Creature, Jonny Lee Miller as Frankenstein Alas, they put him in a loin cloth--probably to not have to rate it R over here. But the bum was still awesome and yes, I thought how uncomfortable those boys must be during--like puppetry of the penis. The play (IMHO): BC/Creature--11 (BC was perhaps a tad too funny--I'm dying now to see the reversal) JLM/Victor--10 (a little too one-note, but I think that was a fault of the script.) Karl Johnson/De Lacey--9 Rest of cast--5 (except the maid--she was cool) Text--8 Set--besides the big musical numbers (Steampunk Starlight Express and Brigadoon, the Zombie Version)--9 (the floor in particular was perfect) Music/sound (in our version)--too loud and inappropriate in some scenes Lighting--intriguing, prob. 8. I liked the use of lightbulbs--the subtle suggestion of industry and electricity--and there were enough of them to be very, very good. Some bursting flares that were a little odd. Reminded me of a recent production of Copenhagen I saw where there were lights whizzing around as if colliding electrons around a nucleus. Costumes--7, ok but really boring and kind of cheap looking. The fur suit was nice. The designer in me has a couple of totally practical questions as the filming often did close ups and pans during the scene changes (close-ups were awesome btw, seeing them sweat) Were the walls plaster? Where did the grass come from? How did BC pop out of the bed? Were the poles he climbed on always on the stage? I may think of some others, but that's a start. Okay, and I'm probably going to get some arguments here. (I subscribe to the if you put a gun on stage theory and I'm a minimalist set designer--if the play wants to be stripped down to a good floor, then that's all it needs to be). Birth scene: FANTASTIC. Perfectly done. For some reason walking on his knuckles really got to me. The joy at each new thing. Perfect. Victor's entrance: necessary if only in the purely practical sense of giving him the cloak, felt like we might have explored the rejection better. Creature in the wild: What was with the GD steampunk train???? Yeah, it looked cool and stuff, and I guess it was supposed to show industrialization and the rejection of the cities, but seriously--Steampunk Starlight Express? We never see the crowds again, we never see industrialization again. Just a throwaway metaphor that might have worked if it had been embellished upon, but was an utter annoying waste the way it was. Do it big or don't do it at all. The countryside: Good, might have pushed further. Air, earth, fire, water. We had real fire (man, the fire codes on this thing must be intense--once had to get fire regulation approval on a curtain--pain in the ASS--and we didn't have any fire on stage). So we had real rain. I thought that unnecessary too. Later we have a whole thunderstorm, but no rain. I'm sure BC could have acted being in the rain. The fire I get because fire is important later. Oh, and the choir of angels? Not so much for me at any rate. De Lacey's cottage: Really, really good. Decoration on scrim a little odd, but that may have been because we were so close to it (there were naked people in the trees??). De Lacey's performance was beautiful. The kids were decent and the 'natural' desire and method of reproduction. There were some really funny bits--BC's mimicry of De Lacey--which made the heartbreak worse. "You promised!" Hated, hated, hated the wet dream ballet. It so felt like Zombie Brigadoon--Come to Me, Bend to Me. Really? That was the best you could come up with for sexual awakening? Death of William: OMG the set was so good here. The look of the water, the appearance of the dock--wow, minimal but perfect. The acting, not so much. Good lord, could George Harris possibly have been any worse? I'll talk really quietly for a bit and THEN I'LL SHRIEK A BIT and then get quiet and call it levels. Oh, and the murder of William was a bit abrupt. I'll get to Elizabeth a little later. In the house: Again, just feel like the scenes are rushed. Father useless, maid fun, Elizabeth weedy. Set, kind of like, kind of get, papercut effect very, very nice. MAJOR sideways rake--why? Why that steep? Pain in the butt for the actors, added nothing--we're skewed? Saw a Hedda Gabbler kind of like it once--worked there because Hedda is all kinds of skewed. Elizabeth--oh, go under my maiden's skirts my love and make with me the babies--because you're not doing it right what with the playing God and stuff. (What was up with that dress? Just because she's titless doesn't mean you can't build out the dress a bit--it was a look at my boobs kind of era. And up close it was clear that they had cut the dresses very authentically, so just not sure why they couldn't have made it fit better. I mean, they gave Kiera Knightly tits in P&P!) Victor and Creature in the mountains: Excellent. Liked BC jumping on poles etc. but we didn't really get to see the entrance, which is why I wondered if they were always there. And here's my big thought--I could imagine this whole play being JUST Victor and the Creature (when I first heard about it, I hoped it would be), with maybe De Lacey, on a nearly empty stage, and some good sound effects and gobos. Victor arrives in the Orkneys: Big old rainstorm with just lighting and sound and ACTING. Serious comedy relief in the form of...wait for it...grave diggers! Brother's ghost--I don't mind it. It was a nice reveal of Victor's character and exposition for what's coming. Again, the creature's joy and sensual desire. The mere touch of her hand was exquisite. And then the denial and the fury. Oh, and set--reversal of house with suggested roof--very nice. Back to Geneva: So, Victor's an ass to Elizabeth and we don't know why she loves him. Then HE JUMPS OUT OF THE BED--seriously, how was he hiding? I thought it was a fake bed somehow, but then they lay on it??? And she's not scared at all, nope not even a little bit, or concerned or puzzled at all. I'm just happy and chipper. And they sit and she's nice AND then despite this he rapes and murders her. (Annoyingly they showed this from above. Made it more weird than it needed to be.) The arctic: Am I remembering correctly that this is the Creature's only soliloquy? If you're going to do it once, you have to do it twice! Question--did Victor pull the sled on stage or did it appear when the house set went a way? Then, the really good (but too short)--I just wanted your love ending and pursuit across the ice. So--big themes. I read Frankenstein a long time ago, but I wrote a paper on it at the time and I've seen all the films, good, bad and ugly + hilarious and camp, as well as sort of meta-ing on the story of its creation (like Gothic, dear God, and The Stress of Her Regard. Like I said above, I'd rather have had more dialog between Victor and the Creature than anything else to explore the nature vs. nurture, what do we owe that which we create, power of hate, power of love. Going back to Copenhagen, it's very dialog heavy (some think too much so) and some of it is esoteric, but the themes are explored and re-examined, parallels made. The little teaser film was kind of limp too, but we did get to see them rehearsing--far too many cuts to montages, like they thought they couldn't talk over the rehearsal scenes or something--like a bad Oscars montage. Bits from the film, birds flying, nuclear reactors--yeah, we get it, science dangerous, nature good. Oh, and I love the original--I wept, wept for the Creature, silly as the make-up was. I thought that Karloff conveyed a world of dialog with no words at all.

Jonny Lee Miller as the Creature, Benedict Cumberbatch as Frankenstein

STILL cannot figure out the bed trick, and this time we saw the bed more completely. Friend and I were completely focused on the bed trying to figure it out. Heard other people on the train discussing it. Humorously someone in the theater screamed when the Creature leapt up. I would stick with my previous numbers. Both JLM and BC were excellent in both roles. And while each brought something to each character, I felt overall that JLM made a better Creature and BC the better Victor. It was interesting to see how JLM did approach it as a child, each thing learned, while BC approached it as someone recovering--a step forward, a step back. After the initial birth I liked JLM's pathos and his anger and dark actions seemed much more believable to me. The rape and murder was much more believable and frightening. (Also, JLM is a fine figure of a man, perhaps not quite BC but certainly very good--really nice legs. He is also a perfectly able to act with his toes as well.) It was especially interesting to see how much was similar in each performance and how much their portrayal of one bled into the other. Again, I wish so much that it had been a two person show. I really do. BC has a great sense of comedic timing which is interestingly not something I would have thought from his two big roles over here. But going back and seeing even something as heartbreaking as "Hawking," you can see that he finds the joy in a role. I think it's part of what makes his "Sherlock" so much fun. There are funny lines, but his delivery is spot on. That said, he has certain mannerisms as an actor which become more apparent when you watch several of his roles back to back. This is not a bad thing. It's certainly true of most actors, but there was much of Sherlock in his Victor. There was also a great deal of comedy in his Creature and while most of it worked, some of it was distracting. As Victor, however, this slight comedic timing made Victor both a more ridiculous character and a more sympathetic one. BC is very, very good at finding levels between beats and at articulating each point with a gesture or a body movement. It's almost dance or mime or mask work. He made Victor's somewhat stilted lines interesting and showed a nice vulnerability with Elizabeth that was not apparent in JLM's. He made the initial beat of seeing the Creature and throwing the cape over him far more believable. There is also something very believably aristocratic about BC, either his stature and figure or his Harrovian schooling or something, but he owned the area more than JLM. (Someone commented on how BC seems like Sherlock is very upperclass, while poor Gatiss doesn't seem as well-born as Mycroft, more a middle-class image of the upper-classes). BC looked more at home in his boots and fine coat. On colorblind casting. I was less bothered this time because William was black. Go figure... You know, elder Frankenstein is a rich man from the plantations in the Caribbean and he married a white woman who already had a son and then started a younger family with her. Or something. Harris was marginally better this night. Very glad that I had the chance to see both. Would view them both again (with remote to skim some parts). Still wonder if it would be so overwhelmingly popular if the leads were not both famous--one for previous work and BC newly for Sherlock. Granted Danny Boyle returning to the theater also helps. Certainly Frankenstein in the theater is an interesting concept, but interesting concepts do not sell out extended runs. Quick question--the "womb" is onstage and visible at the beginning, correct? Does that mean that the actor has to be in place before the house is opened? I've done shows like that, where the nature of the staging meant you had to get into position and stay there while the house filled, and it's...terrifying, so even more kudos to them.

Where do I look, where do I witness?

2011-03-14T00:01:00.000-04:00

My thoughts are with friends and their families directly touched by the earthquake in Japan and by the resulting tsunami.

We run out of money and in many ways we run out of emotion as well.

Peru, Australia, New Zealand, now Japan…

In a different category, Wisconsin, Prop. 8…

Each new and immediate catastrophe pre-empts the one before. Our money and our focus are needed elsewhere. New Orleans is still rebuilding, Iraq is still in pieces, but we must parcel out our love and our money in triage.

I can't help anyone cause everyone's so cold
Everyone's so skeptical of
everything they're told
And even I get sick of needing to be sold

Though it's only half a month away, the media's gone
An entertaining
scandal broke today, but I can't move on
I'm haunted by a story and I do my
best to tell it
Can't even give this stuff away, why would I sell it?
Everybody's laughing, while at me they point a finger
A world that loves
its irony must hate the protest singer

So I'll be leaving soon
I'll
be leaving soon
I'll be leaving soon
I'll be leaving soon

~Helicopters, Barenaked Ladies

"...coming to terms with this permanent state of combat readiness..."

2011-02-06T00:28:00.000-05:00

A remarkable article by an American Iraqi veteran on being home:

"Jumping back into civilian life headlong, like I'd originally attempted, proved
both disastrous and shortsighted. And coming to terms with this permanent state
of combat readiness has made me realize just how much I miss war (or parts of
it), and how lucky--and twisted--I am to be able to even write those words. I
miss the camaraderie. I miss the raw excitement."

"I miss that daily sense of purpose, survive or die, that simply can't be
replicated in everday existence. I miss standing for something more than myself,
even if I never figured out just what the hell that something was supposed to
be."

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/01/19/pilgrims-progress/?scp=3&sq=matt%20gallagher&st=cse

Le Carre - Our Kind of Traitor

2011-01-26T01:43:00.002-05:00

I always feel despair when I finish a Le Carre. At the state of the world. At the bastard who profit in it.

All right, granted, the Service has a statutory interest in international
crookery and money-laundering. We fought for a piece of it when times were hard,
and now we’re landed with it. I refer to that unfortunate fallow period between
the Berlin Wall coming down and Osama bin Laden doing us the favor of 9/11. We
fought for a piece of the money-laundering market the same as we fought for a
larger slice of Northern Ireland, and whatever other modest pickings were
available to justify our existence. But that was then, Hector. And this is now,
and as of today, which is where we are living, like it or not, your Service and
mine has better things to do with its time and resources than get its knickers
caught in the highly complex wheels of City of London finance, thank you.

…furthermore, we also have, in this country, a very large, fully
incorporated, somewhat over-financed sister agency that devotes its efforts,
such as they are, to matters of serious and organized crime, which I take it is
what you are purporting to be unveiling here. Not to mention Interpol, and any
number of competing American agencies falling over each other’s very large feet
to do the same job while careful not to prejudice the prosperity of that great
nation.

And to hell with the morality of it. To hell with the people who get hurt and die. They're just collateral to the greater good, or the greater profit, whichever it's more prudent to back at any time.

He’d heard that the Empowerment Committee had its own war room these days. It
seemed appropriate: somewhere ultra, ultra secret, suspended from wires or
buried a hundred feet underground. Well, he’d been in rooms like that: in Miami
and Washington when he was trading Intelligence with his chers collegues in the
CIA or the Drug Enforcement Agency or the Alcohol, Firearms & Tobacco Agency
and God knew what all the other agencies had been. And his measured opinion was
that they were places that guaranteed collective insanity. He’d watched how the
body language changed as the Indoctrinated Ones abandoned themselves and their
common sense to the embrace of their virtual world.

Sorry to be so dark here. Le Carre always does that to me.

What We Lose

2010-12-31T03:28:00.002-05:00

My pets are old--one ancient and one a senior citizen.

Mephisto (cat, 20 yrs. old) had a stroke and is blind and deaf. The other senses are fine--he can smell us when we come in and will scream to signal. He can feel and purrs loudly when we hold him in our laps--which he always wants to do as it is his only sensation. The stroke though has left him wandering in circles and he bumps into things, so he is not feeling space the way that he should as a cat.

Guinness (dog, 13 yrs. old) is deaf in both ears. The ear canal has been removed from one, and the other is so blocked that it too will require removal. He does not wake when we call to him (he never came) but we use hand signals which seem to actually work better, but you must touch him first to get his attention. We have to be careful to touch him gently if coming up on him as he startles.

We have always suspected that his vision and smell were not what they should be, as he would often jump upon encountering things outside, but his hearing was acute. Of course, now he does not go mad when the doorbell rings, or sirens go by outside or Mephisto screams in the night and he sleeps longer, undisturbed.

As a human these losses would be felt acutely as they came (as they are for some of my older relatives). We would know all that we had lost and would never have again. That would add to our sense of loss.

I wonder, do they know what they have lost? Does Mephisto remember seeing and stalking outside? Does Guinness miss when he could hear us call? Did they suffer their own grief upon losing these senses, or feel just a temporary confusion and then readjustment? Do they wish their youth and health back? They are both so thin now for a variety of reasons. Are they aware? Do they see and hear in their dreams? Or, as scientists tell us, are their memories so short that this silence, this darkness seems to be all that has ever been?

Saving a poem here so that I don't lose it

2010-12-10T00:07:00.001-05:00

Just a little autumn haiku.

A leaf drifted past
my window. Sadly it speaks
of Autumn's coming

The Road by Cormac McCarthy

2010-08-31T14:47:00.002-04:00

Not all dying words are true and this blessing is no less real for being shorn of its ground.

Query: How does the never to be differ from what never was?

He thought that in the history of the world it might even be that there was more punishment than crime but he took small comfort from it.

When you've nothing else construct ceremonies out of the air and breathe upon them.

The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet by David Mitchell

2010-07-31T17:05:00.004-04:00

I love David Mitchell, the British author (as opposed to David Mitchell, the British comedian) of Cloud Atlas, Ghostwritten, Number 9 Dream, Black Swan Green and now this, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet.

Like Iain Banks/Iain M. Banks, Mitchell seems to write one "normal" or linear narrative in between the time and mind bending ones (someone is attempting to film Cloud Atlas. I think this is a very, very bad idea). That said, this is a good book, but not his best, which is rather like saying that The Magnificent Ambersons isn't Citizen Kane.

This is, to a certain extent (which looking back over my blog is a phrase I use too much), a historical romance set at the very end of the 18th century and the beginning of the 19th on an artificial trading island off the coast of Nagasaki. Mitchell lived in Japan for many years and is very familiar with the culture.

It is both a love story and a historical story--describing pretty factually as far as I have researched a true incident that took place in 1808. An English ship attempted to take the Dutch trading post by force and open Nagasaki to English trade. This was in part because the Dutch trading empire was in taters--the famous Dutch East India company had gone bankrupt, and Holland itself was occupied by Napoleon's army. The British ship failed, the lone Dutch port staggered on until Holland recovered and Japan was only finally opened by force when Perry sailed in in the 1850's.

That said, it is better when it is a love story. There is also a side line story which kept reminding me of The Name of the Rose, although they are not really similar, except that they both take place in Abbeys where some terrible things are going on.

Mitchell is a master at placing the person in time. The first section is a slow day-to-day of life in the tiny port (something like the size of a football field, as far as I can gauge, fan shaped with three warehouses, a main residence, lesser residences and an infirmary, perhaps 20 people all told, counting slaves) through the eyes of a young honest clerk, Jacob. Jacob falls in love with the slightly disfigured daughter of a Samurai doctor who is studying with the port's Doctor. Dutch studies became a staple of Nagasaki for many years. Whether she returns his love is a matter of conjecture throughout the book, so it is tragic, unrequited love, which sets in motion a variety of other things. The second half concerns Miss Aibagawa after her father dies and she is forced to retire to an Abbey despite or because of her skill as a mid-wife. The third part is about the British attempt. And in the last 5 pages we learn about the rest of Jacob's life--some thirty years back in Holland.

It is something of a let down, and that is unfortunate. Had it remained more of a character study I would actually think it better. Perhaps the last thirty years only take five pages, because the real part of Jacob's life is in those few years at the port of Nagasaki. Like the moment in Joyce's The Dubliners when the protagonist realizes that his wife is still in love with her dead young man.

No culture comes out unscathed. The lone American is a beastly captain who knows the way to deal with the "slave problem." It is one of Mitchell's few heavy handed missteps that EVERY time the American captain speaks of the lesser races and bringing civilization he does something particularly disgusting like pick his nose, fart or belch or examine the contents of his teeth. The Dutch are corrupt, the English arrogant, and the Japanese willfully blind--treasuring their sacred isolated culture over all else (detailed brilliantly in Stephen Sondheim's Pacific Overtures about the Perry landing.) Locked into their code of honor which requires suicide to appease petty crimes. It was a pivotal time in the history of Japan, as the western inventions, such as the gun rendered Samurai little more than civil servants, but still required them to maintain a status that they could not afford, and prohibited the rise of the merchant class who had the money.

But it is in the private stories of the lower orders that we really learn about this time--of the press ganging that brought most of them out, of orphanages out of Dickens and abusive relatives. Of the promise of wealth in the east Indies that most of them will never see, instead spending the rest of their lives half a world away from all they know. No wonder then that they are so cruel and so incapable of empathy for anyone else.

"Act, implores the Ghost of Future Regret, I shan't give you another
chance...Damned fool, groans the Demon of Present Regret. What have you
done?"

"Creation unfolds around us, despite us, and through us, at the speed of
days and nights, and we like to call it 'love'"

James Baldwin quotes | Quotations at Dictionary.com

2010-07-23T14:07:00.000-04:00

James Baldwin quotes Quotations at Dictionary.com

Extra! Extra! Loann Agrees With Sarah Palin (sort of)

2010-07-23T12:50:00.003-04:00

Oh, how it pains me to say this, but I don't hate the word refudiate or Palin for creating it. And, she is right, Shakespeare added a plethora of new words and phrases to the English language, or at least solidified them from the spoken of the time to what we know and accept today. Any language is a moving, growing thing. A river that is different from second to second and possibly no more so than English which has become the closest thing to a global language (for no particularly good reason other than Imperialism and the British navy). Sometime ago now, I read The Story of English and wrote a little about it--meant to write more and somehow didn't. To a certain extent, Shakespeare defined English. James Joyce gleefully broke it.

So what makes them geniuses and Palin an idiot? Well, there is the fact that their writing is lyric and lasting. That they make sense (even Joyce if you are as learned as he--which I'm not) while Palin is famously incoherent in other ways. She is also a hypocrite--whinging about press attacks while happily jumping on band wagons to bash her opponents--but that's political and I don't mean this to be. Liberals forgave President Obama for saying he had been to 57 states on the campaign trail but the right waived their arms above their heads and spouted all kinds of conspiracy theories. So, perhaps we should give Sarah a little slack on this one.

I am not the grammarian about whom your mother warned you. I admit to playing fast and loose with the English language. I can't spell worth a damn. I never learned to diagram a sentence and don't remember all the rules about punctuation or grammar but go with what seems right in my head at the time. A comma for a pause, etc. I have embarrassingly used irregardless. I mispronounce words that I have only read on the page and I am probably guilty of more malapropisms than I am even aware of (ending with a preposition).

But what is "correct" English anyway. At the time of Shakespeare there were wide divergences in spelling from region to region, probably even from street to street in London. It would be almost 150 years before Johnson would write the first dictionary and many of his sources and usages came from Shakespeare. Some of the finest and most moving sentences in the language flout proper usage of their time--BUT become proper usage because of their power.

There will always be those who pedantically try to stem the tide--akin to standing in sand and trying to stop a slow moving train. You won't get hurt but you won't hurt the train, and you will be pushed backwards. Even the least snobbish of us has something that just sets our teeth on edge in common usage. I cannot stand the New England "draw" for "drawer" especially since I have seen many people here write it as "draw" as in, "My socks are in the top draw of the bureau." I also despise Aks for Ask.

But who am I to say--in 100 years time they may be accepted, if not in place of, at least alongside my preference in the dictionary (Futurama plays with this in one of its earliest episodes):

An Englishman's way of speaking
absolutely classifies him,
The moment he talks he makes
some other Englishman despise him.
One common language
I'm afraid we'll never get
--Henry Higgins, My Fair Lady

Whether high or low, someone will be annoyed by the way you speak.

That said, I believe that we should all aspire to speaking accepted conventional English as well as we possibly can, not because its "right" in some absolutest way, but because it opens up more opportunities. Like learning English--although the same is true of us, English speakers, should try to learn other languages.

I also despise the use of "txt spk" in non-text situations. But I continue to use LOL, LMFAO, IMHO and OMG. And thus, these things enter the lexicon. When did email become the verb and not just the noun that one sends? When did it become understood that when one says they have too much spam they are probably not talking about the canned meat immortalized by Monty Python? Who decided that a device for moving a cursor about a windows environment should be called a mouse--why not a potato? At the turn of the last century there was a typewriting machine and the typewriter who used it. At some point the typewriter became the machine and the user a typist.

I certainly prefer the loose conversational style of English to the stilted business or legalese like this fine example that came across my desk for editing the other day:

This is pursuant to a continuing Securities and Exchange Commission approved
program which permits the custodian to no longer retain the physical
certificates in representation of the positions...What renders the certificates
as nontransferable, in this case, is the lack of the transfer agent...It makes
for an efficient maintenance process of these positions by eliminating
statements for accounts holding only these nontransferable assets.

Yer wot?

Which I rewrote as:

This is part of a continuing Securities and Exchange Commission program which
allows the custodian to destroy the physical certificates. Lack of the transfer
agent can make the certificates nontransferable. This makes it easier to process
these positions by eliminating statements...

I probably could have done even better if I'd taken more time. And if I'd managed to understand more fully what was being said (the party of the first part...).

I think what annoys me most is a laziness in speaking. (And I am sure I am as guilty as I am condemning). Cliches last because they are true, but they are so often thrown out as a way of not thinking. Business gobbledygook pains me because it generally means nothing; it is as bland and unchallenging, herd mentalliting as it can be. Holistic and proactive are two words that make me furious and I replace as often as possible (only to have my boss put them back--grrr). Holistic, IMHO, belongs in the realm of homeopathic medicine and proactive in preventative care.

But (there is always another side, isn't there) short-hand common terms, cliches and trite expressions exist to make communication easier, to put us all on the same page (hate that one too--we're all going to the same URL, we all occupy the same point in the space time continuum, we're all friended) so that we can seemingly understand one another quickly. All language is but a short hand, symbols for concrete things to allow us to work with our fellow man. No word is anything in and of itself except for the thing we define by it.

And if you tell anyone that I forgive Sarah Palin, I will refudiate it to the best of my ability.

In For a Penny, in for a Pound--Twilight the Movie

2010-07-23T12:27:00.002-04:00

I wasn't going to do it. Oh, how I wasn't going to do it. And I didn't. Not really. I only watched part, and even then I was working on other things. Not focusing. But those are really mea culpas.

I watched part of Twilight last night. It was not quite as bad as I expected. I suppose, if your expectation is 0, then a 1 is an improvement. Kristin Stewart was not quite as annoying as I expected. Robert Pattinson slightly more romantic. Which is to damn with faint praise. It's not a very well put together movie. How is it that this woman directed Thirteen and Lords of Dogtown?

Only two things actually interested me enough to pay attention. One, the fact that when Bella and Edward are in the woods and she says Vampire all mysterious and sexy like, the camera cuts away to the tops of the trees and then breaks and comes back to them lying on their backs. That used to be cinema convention for a sex scene, but, as we all know, Bella and Edward don't have sex until they are properly wed. Is the director inserting something here (no pun intended)? And two, totally trivia. Is the Cullen's house the same one that was used in Ferris Bueller? And were the interiors sets or location. I did like the set up of the baddies which is not part of the book--at least we aren't entirely trapped in Bella's head. (I didn't watch the payoff, so not sure how that set up played out)

Annoyances--why is it so blue? Why does Edward look like someone dumped glitter on him in the sun? Queen of the Damned was a terrible movie, but by God, the vampires glowed in that (probably with actual metal in the make-up or mica). Why is Mr. Cullen's hair color so fake? Why does Edward bounce around in the trees like some demented monkey, and why are the CGIs of his speed and agility so bad? I mean we've come a long way in the CGI department even from the First Hulk movie when he seemed to have no weight. Surely a movie this big could have done better.

Writing....?

2010-07-23T11:51:00.005-04:00

Some mornings I wake up and think, "I want to write a story, start that novel, try something on the page." But rather than walk right in to my laptop which I named "Writer" for inspiration, I have to get ready for work, or if home alone and free, like today, there is the dog to be walked, both animals to be fed and medicated. After my own breakfast, perhaps, and, oh, there is a load of laundry to be started. And I should...

If I am so unhappy and underemployed in my current job, then I SHOULD spend every spare moment actively searching for work. Right? But I didn't do it even when happily employed (although sometimes I think that I have never been happily employed--either I liked the work and not the people or liked the people and not the work, and have never until this job liked the money--but that is a topic I've beaten before.)

And I write essays/blog posts. They are so easy for me--they're half written in my head before I even sit down at the keyboard. And sometimes I don't even manage that--once written in my head, the need to write passes.

Perhaps that is the key--I need to write the essays--to get them out of my head, to enjoy the sound of my own voice, to keep my writing skills from rusting away altogether, so that I can do my day job better, and keep my vocabulary sharp. But unfortunately, it's not likely that anyone is going to pay me for my essays. The papers are laying off seasoned essayists and movie and book reviewers are an endangered breed. The editorial or weekly column has been replaced by the blog. Oh, sure there are some who manage to get paid over at Huffington or Salon, but I'm not really in line for those. And some bloggers manage to make money but they write on one topic and I, I am, as always, all over the place. The marketer in me knows that I could market myself better--have better SEO--if I made separate blogs for the different threads, one for book reviews, one for movie reviews and film discussion and one for general rantings like this, but even then there is so much noise on the internet now. Once upon a time it might have been possible to stand out, but now, while there are numerous perfectly terrible writers on the web, there are also many, many very good writers.

But, I don't seem to NEED to write fiction, but I long to. I sometimes need to write poetry, but that is a fool's game even more than writing essays. I am not such an egotist to think that my poetry is so revolutionary that it commands attention and adoration. It is fair to middling. I am not Eliot or Ted Hughes whose talent was so blazing and original that people bowed down to it. And is that even possible now--to stand out from the crowd that much now? And even then I need to write a poem perhaps once every 6 months...hardly enough to call myself a poet.

Perhaps because it seems that all my friends are closet writers, and many are even published, I think that I should. Is it jealousy? Is it another 'should'? A sense that this is what my Amherst English degree was for, since it seems to not be helping me in any other way.

The essays are also easy because they are done--I could edit them, tighten them, would if it mattered at all. But a story--you can work on a story for years before it's done, before it holds together and has a voice and is compelling for anyone but you. I'm all about instant gratification. Even when I manage to walk into my studio I turn to the crafts and sewing first because I can call them done at a certain point. The dress is finished. The necklace done. I am not an artist of paint or materials who will work forever on a sculpture. My pieces need to be practical. A friend suggested that maybe I need to do the crafting in a way that I do not NEED to do the writing. But I think it is mere fear of the time commitment. Not that I enjoy crafting and sewing more than the act of writing, because I don't.

This friend has been religious in the last year in writing the morning 5 pages of brain dump and then the section of a novel. That's what it takes. Everyone says so. At least those who publish consistently, produce consistently. The commitment to treat the writing as a job, not as a flash of lightening. What I should do (again should--I am drowning in shoulds), is to treat the essays as a brain dump, and then turn automatically to the fiction. I certainly waste time--don't clean, don't look for work--in other ways, why not in something more meaningful, more hopeful than the next Hidden Object video game?

I think I am also afraid that I don't have enough ideas for fiction. I only seem to have three stories that I interested in telling. Harlan Ellison and Neil Gaiman talk of having so many "What ifs" in there heads that they can't get them down fast enough. God, grant me that problem. Or would they come if I only opened the tap?

Thoughts on Twilight by Stephenie Meyers

2010-07-10T14:25:00.005-04:00

Ok, so I read the damn thing in one night--yeah, I'm weird like that.

It is a page turner, I'll give you that. And yet, when I turned the last page, even with the "preview" of the next novel, I had absolutely no interest in what happened next, because the tension in Twilight (and I presume the sequels) is not whether or not Bella will die, but whether she and Edward will ever consummate their love. And that is the secret of its mad success.

Beyond everything it is a Romance novel that happens to be with young adults some of whom are vampires. If straight (read male) porn is all about seeing the climax, then romance (read female) is all about NOT having the climax. The long, slow building with the end only in the reader's imagination.

I have read that Meyers is inspired by Austen, and while Austen was able to weave a great deal about human nature and even politics and mores of her time into her books, which Meyers absolutely is not, the books are, at the heart, romances and their popular appeal I suspect, has far more to do with that than their literary value in lit.crit. classes. The agonizing denial is the heart of the books. It is Mr. Darcy desperately wanting to touch Lizzy in the rain and denying himself. It is Emma falling at last into Mr. Knightly's arms after he has waited so patiently for her to figure it out. And it is very telling that all other romances (and apparently this one as well) end with a wedding. They don't begin there.

It is relatively obvious why the books should appeal to pre-teen and teenage girls. They can picture themselves as Bella. The chaste kisses that can never go any further leave out the messy details of real sex. And even if they are having real sex, it gives them a place to live out romance and sensuality which is probably lacking in their relationships with real teenage boys. What most girls are looking for is what Amanda Palmer describes "Cause like any girl all she really wants is That fickle little bitch romance...all around the nation The girls are crying and the boys are masturbating." (Shores of California, The Dresden Dolls)

The Moms who like it are a) remembering their own teenage years, identifying with Bella both if they were popular and certainly if they were not and b) looking for romance as well. They may love their husbands, but they are probably well past being "in love" with their husbands--that mad, passionate time when all you want is to be with that person every minute of every day (again, for the girls holding hands and whispering sweet nothings and for the boys, going further). That all you can think of is that person, their smell, their voice, their mere presence is intoxicating. Romance, by ending at the wedding (or death as in Bella's beloved R&J, and I guess in this--the undeath) promises a lifetime of that emotion. We never have to see if Mr. Darcy snores or goes bald or gets fat. Or that Lizzy after having the first child isn't really interested in sex anymore. Edward promises a lifetime of feeling like that--nay, an eternity. He doesn't have morning breath, he exhales perfume (a little odd for someone who is dead). In this the books resemble nothing so much as straight Yaoi (which I'm not going to explain here--go look it up).

And I admit that I am not entirely immune to that feeling. I admit to rewinding (what an archaic term that is now--but what do we say, reversing?) that moment in the rain between Matthew McFayden and Keira Knightly a few times over, or the moment in The Painted Veil when Edward Norton and Naomi Watts finally fall into each others arms in pleasure and pain. I certainly remember when I was a teenager that the moments that caused the sweetest feelings were certainly not the blatant sex scenes in Judith Krantz, or Harold Robbins (which are just plain scary) but the moment in those "literary" romances that expressed the most longing. From The Scarlet Pimpernel, this passage has remained with me always:

Had she but turned back then, and looked out once more on the rose-lit garden,
she would have seen that which would have made her own sufferings seem but light
and easy to bear--a strong man, overwhelmed with his own passion and his own
despair. ... the will was powerless. He was but a man madly, blindly,
passionately in love, and as soon as her light footsteps had died away within
the house, he knelt down upon the terrace steps, and in the very madness of his
love he kissed one by one the places where her small foot had trodden, and the
stone balustrade there, where her tiny hand had rested last.

Dear God, who wouldn't want to be loved, worshipped like that? I read that passage over and over again. The suffering, the passion. That he is also the Scarlet Pimpernel, that daring and brilliant hero and it is his love for her and fear for her safety which make him stand aloof in defiance of his own feelings, is the crux of the romance, just as it is with Edward. The unfortunate effect of this is that we hold that romantic ideal into our grown up life. No one can be so devoted to us all the time, any more than we can be devoted to them all the time. Unless they are a cipher, a non-character existing only for those moments of devotion as it is again with Edward and Bella. I know people who expect that kind of devotion and when they do not find it (as it is impossible) they move on to the next, always disappointed and also, in many ways, cruel.

I suspect that even in the fourth book when the consummation occurs in the human sense, it is discretely off stage. That, like that other popular romance, Gone With the Wind, it probably ends with Edward carrying her off to their bedroom to engage in sex that is pain and awkwardness free. (Feel free to tell me if this isn't so.)

The other tension inducing consummation, that of Edward turning Bella, is probably described in excruciating detail because suffering for our love is so romantic. In fact, the writing style of the book reminds me of nothing so much as any teenage Live Journal that you can find from a quick Google search.

And there is where I loose interest. It is horribly written. Like some bad angst blog (which I hope this one is not) Bella is completely self-absorbed without any real self-knowledge. She is not a fully dimensional character and it's her book! Her narration! In some ways the book would be better if it were in third person. We might have a better sense of reality if someone or an omnipotent narrator were observing. Even Edward is hardly sketched in. He is passion and denial and guilt and that's about it. Everyone else is merely a line or two here or there. I could not stand four whole books of their dithering. The eroticism of his nose and mouth along her jaw wears out with repetition. I skimmed the unpublished and partial Midnight Sun to see if coming from Edward's perspective was any better--it's not. Bella is no more real or deep to him than he is to her. I quite frankly found it hard to believe that he would be interested in her. (And I find Kristen Stewart quite unattractive as well--which I suppose is fitting.) Although if we start down the path of plot points, why do the Vampires bother going to high school at all? They could pass themselves off as home schooled and their frozen ages would be less noticeable.

As Laura Miller in Salon notes:

... Bella is not really the point of the Twilight series; she's more of a
place holder than a character. She is purposely made as featureless and ordinary
as possible in order to render her a vacant, flexible skin into which the reader
can insert herself and thereby vicariously enjoy Edward's chilly charms.
I am intrigued by Meyers own story. A Mormon mother who has admitted Austen as her influence (which is unfair to Austen--as I said before, Austen is full of careful character and societal studies) as well as Orsen Scott Card, which makes more sense to me. Ender's Game appeals at a certain age because one visualizes oneself as the historyless and inner-lifeless Ender. Given that tribute, Midnight Sun makes more sense. Contrast Ender with Joe Hill's (Stephen King's son) Gunpowder sometime.

Likewise, contrast Twilight with any of its "cousins." Buffy and Angel couldn't consummate after the first time for totally different reasons, but Buffy had a vast life outside of Angel (and Angel had a show without her) involving friends, personal grief, conflicts and kicking ass, yeah, don't forget the kicking ass. Buffy was a match for Angel. She was the Slayer after all. Bella is no match for Edward in any way.

And the many comparisons to Harry Potter are (to me) unfounded. As Stephen King said, J.K. Rowling can write. Stephenie Meyers can't write worth a damn. And I know that many would find that rich coming from Stephen King, but both Rowling and King are able to do three things very well:
One--write, wordsmith, put sentences together that are descriptive, varied and with their own distinct voice
Two--write characters with histories that shape their presents and futures in which they change and grow, who are different from the other characters in the book and not just offhandedly superficially different
Three--craft multi-layered plots that leave one breathless with their construction, the early throwaway line or character who becomes vital later, the sense of real danger or at least of real change, the strong climax (no pun intended) and the graceful denouement

Likewise, Meyers is no match even for Anne Rice, her spiritual predecessor (in more ways than one), whom she does not cite as an inspiration, but surely it is Rice's beautiful, powerful, erotic but sexless vampires to whom she owes her own? Rice is an overblown writer, a little overly in love with her own voice (but then, so are Rowling and King) but her plots are far more interesting. I can still recall them more than 20 years later, the desperation at the end of The Vampire Lestat that one would have to wait for Queen of the Damned and then QotD's labyrinthine layers and detailed history of how the Vampires came to be. Her later books failed precisely because they gave way to sex in place of tension (and because she became repetitive.)

Touching briefly on Vampire literature and then I'll close, Vampires are always the other--first as objects of fear and then as objects of both lust, damnation and fear. They have stood in for our fears of the dark, our fears of addiction (both drug induced and human induced) and our fears of homosexuality. They are not going away anytime soon. There are many other Vampire series that are more interesting than this one and better written. Likewise there are many other books in general that touch on the same themes with better result.

Am I sorry that I read it? No, I do not mind the three or four hours of my life that are gone, but I don't regret that I need not watch the movies, or indeed ever worry about this again.

A Facebook discussion on politics

2010-06-12T23:44:00.005-04:00

This was a recent Facebook discussion in which I rambled on so long that I decided to bring it over here to preserve it.

Me: On being in a room full of Republicans/Conservatives...I hate the fact that I can't always articulate answers to their statements or get my valid points across even though I can with people of a similar mindsets. I fear that politeness is misconstrued as agreeing or yielding. L'esprit d'escalier.

Me (in response to some short posts): I agree about parties and that a conservative would feel that, but I was talking specifically about my own ability or inability to come up with answers/facts/arguments on the spot even though I can think of a long list of points later. For example, a woman here rattled off some stats from one of those sourceless things that roam the internet and I was 99% sure that I had checked Snopes and found out it was rubbish but I wasn't quite sure enough to challenge.

A: I read George Lakoff's book Moral Politics a number of years ago and it changed my whole way of thinking about these types of discussions.

Me: It's not that I want to be right or that I think I'm going to change their minds, but I enjoy a good discussion and think that I'm open to seeing other sides esp. coming from a conservative background. What I am afraid of when I don't speak up enough is that it will be thought that I am not passionate about my beliefs or that they are not well thought out.

J: I'm the same way. If only we could stop time, figure out what to say, then push start again.

M: I'm interested in that Lakoff book, too. Intriguing.
And I think agreeing to disagree is often one more way we perpetuate bad behavior - some things you can disagree about (The Steelers vs. the Browns. vs. the Jets) but some things just make people bad human beings (human rights issues, etc.).
Novel - just be careful you don't fall into the trap of wanting to sound like (and argue/debate like) people who get all their news from pundits and wingnut radio wonks.

T: Hey Loann,
Speaking as a conservative and a libertarian, and whatever else you may want to call me, I am all about dialoging with anyone, honestly and calmly, and I don't have all the answers, and I don't like to argue just for the sake of winning an argument. What I don't like is the vicious name calling that comes from both directions. This is not dialogue. We go nowhere this way. I think all the talk and hype and vitriol may start in the political arena, but it ultimately goes beyond politics and ends up dealing with world views and philosophies and beliefs. And that gets ouchy. We all have to be willing to take what we dish out.

Me: Wow, this has provoked more discussion than I expected. Especially since I meant it more as a personal musing on what I perceive as a personal failing.
A--took a glance at the description of Moral Politics (also wandered into a good online quiz moral-politics.com on which I scored slightly left of center and my husband scored way to the left, no shock there) and I definitely agree with the premise. In fact, I wrote something like it when I was in college based on Kuhn's idea of the paradigm shift in science (for which I have been scolded by my scientist friends for taking hard science and using it as a metaphor for sociological behavior)--in essence that it is impossible for people in one paradigm to even discuss issues with someone in another, because they are almost literally in different worlds and even their language is alien. For Kuhn, it was the idea that once Einsteinian physics had developed, it was impossible to continue to speak to a purely Newtonian physicist. And likewise Einstein could not discuss Quantum theory.
I believe that liberals and conservatives (note I don't use parties) live in two different worlds, where words mean different things. Only personal experience will change a person--for example, having a gay relative. That I went from someone who could win an Ayn Rand essay contest at 15 to where I am today has to do with my life experiences and observations. Most financial conservatives, including those at the conference, believe it is because I have never had any wealth to protect.
T--I absolutely agree that senseless name calling is unproductive in any sense, but unfortunately, like stereotyping, humans have a desire to group things as a way to process information and to see patterns so that we are not constantly having to create our perceptions from scratch. Politics are absolutely as complex and as heartfelt as and often tied to one's faith.
M--I don't think I'm Keith Olbermann or Lewis Black yet (smiley face). But, seriously, one must challenge racists or be complicit.
Here's the example from the Summit...
A man was talking about being on the town council in his New York town and how they didn't get stimulus money to build a civic center while the town next to them received money to restore sidewalks. I personally believe sidewalks are more important than civic centers, but I didn't say that because I don't know the details (did the town want sidewalks in non-traffic areas, etc.). He said that it was because his town is primarily Republican and the next town is primarily Democrat.
I did say, "Shouldn't you, as a Republican refuse stimulus money on principle?" He said that the way he views it, it's his tax money and he should get it back any way he can.
What I wanted to say was that in the Ayn Randian sense, all Republicans/Libertarians/conservatives should refuse stimulus money if they believe that it is a corrupt idea. That Bobbie Jindal (sp.?) is a hypocrite to say that big government programs are bad and then demand major help when things go bad for his state.
But I didn't. I also didn't say that Snopes says that the stimulus money was distributed equally between red states and blue states contrary to an internet trope.

Another example for which I am a little more ashamed was a woman ranting about how her hard-earned money goes to people who don't work and pop out children, etc. I wanted to say that conservatives see only the undeserving poor, while liberals think that saving the deserving poor (having been a deserving poor) is worth the supporting of the undeserving poor. In the same way many (and I should point out that I am generalizing--as above we stereotype, profile and shorthand to break things into manageable bites. Neither liberalism or conservatism, right or left are homogenized and most people hold positions on both of what is perceived of as this side or that) liberals believe that letting some bad people go unpunished by the death penalty is better than killing even one innocent man. Some/many conservatives also hold this view but disagree in others. Instead of speaking up I just slipped away from the conversation.

The funny post-script to this is that the first man came up to me at the end of the summit and said that he admired how I hadn't challenged the woman and made a scene but had quietly removed myself from having to listen and that he had heard from a co-worker that I was capable of a careful and rational discourse wherein I heard and understood the feelings that led to both opinions. I may not agree with conservatives, but I think I understand why you might think what you think, that homosexuality or abortion is a sin if you believe that the Bible says that, that you believe in a strong military and fighting any hint of communism/socialism as my father did because you lived through the cold war, or that you would believe in the death penalty if you or anyone you love was attacked. I cannot even say that such experiences would not change my mind. The old saying--a conservative is a liberal who's been mugged.
On the financial side, if I were paying 50% of my income for which I worked hard and dragged myself up by the bootstraps for to support people I perceived as being lazy I might be resentful. The two things I have real trouble understanding are a) being against big-government--isn't that why we have a government? and b) nationalism based on a random function of birth--that being part of the human race should trump country allegiance in the grand scheme of things, although I understand and am proud of accomplishments of the United States and the "American" spirit.

So, in returning to my original point it seems that I am better at defending my positions and stating my strong beliefs without being antagonizing than I thought. Which makes me feel better about myself.

And a final thought regarding sides. I have many friends up here who consider themselves fiscal conservatives and social liberals. That is they believe in smaller government, less handouts and more personal responsibility or some variation thereof, but believe in gay marriage and an end to "Don't ask, don't tell," strong separation of church and state, human rights for all, etc. In truth I rather believe some of that as well. There is a strong trend in this country to equate capitalism with democracy and morality, and socialism with anti-Americanism and degeneracy. An economic system is not in and of itself a governmental system, nor is it a moral system.

And finally, finally, in 100 years universal health care will seem no more socialist than free primary/secondary education for everyone does now, despite the fact that this was viewed as destroying the social order and leading down the path of socialism 100+ years ago, when it was first instituted as many things were that we now take for granted such as regulation.

I hope that my Facebook friends have followed me here and that we can have an interesting and civilized discussion amongst ourselves.

Housekeeping

2010-05-21T16:36:00.003-04:00

Is it just me or does everyone think that their house is not clean enough?

I hate housekeeping. I really do. So I avoid it. So my house probably isn't clean enough, but even when I feel that I really clean, I sit down only to look over and see dust on some surface that I missed.

Part of it is not maintaining. Part of it is living in an old house where there are uneven surfaces and cracks and crevices where dust can hide. I have white stairs--well, they were white when I moved in. Even getting down on my hands and knees with a bucket doesn't seem to make a difference. Part of it is having a dog and a cat and the slow detritus of hair and skin that makes up dust--but other people have children AND a dog and a cat and seem to keep up.

Part of it is simply having too much stuff--too many books, too many figurines with tiny nooks and crannies. I can't dust them all every week, let alone take the books out and dust behind them, so the dust remains and contaminates my clean house.

My therapist says that it is the worry that does me in. The comparisons with imaginary Joneses that are more worrisome than a little (or a lot) of dust. That some very horrible and unhappy people live in pristine houses while some very happy people live in dusty chaos.

Don't get me wrong, I'm relatively tidy and organized. I can find almost anything I'm looking for within a few minutes, from old photos to tea lights. In terms of tidy I could have a tidy house for people coming over in less than an hour with my husband's help (as the untidy is mostly his)--except for our shared desk which is an overrun melting pot of scraps of paper, notepads and electronic cables.

But clean? Not really.

I think part of the fear comes with the desire not to be my mother. My mother is one object away from being on that show about Hoarders. How she would hate my publishing that here. Throwing things away is painful to her. I'm a collector, but I can throw away with impunity. I may have clothes from when I was thirteen, but only because they still fit and are in decent shape. If they don't fit and I can't alter or remake them they're gone. Shoes, which I am very hard on due to clumsiness and foot rolling, are gone after a season no matter how much I loved them. But I do remake things and keep things that might be useful--am I in danger?

The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power

2010-05-21T15:15:00.002-04:00

Also watched “Fraility” a disturbing little film about faith and families—don’t know what else to say about it.

And finished “The Family…” Is it paranoid? Conspiracy theorist? It seems well-researched and has certainly taken on great meaning in light of recent events to pundits of the left such as Rachel Maddow whom I respect (and—full disclosure--kind of lust after because I love smart nerds).

According to the book, there is a quiet, not-quite hidden or secret, but shadowy nevertheless, organization, known now as the Family who works behind the scenes of Washington politics and from there the world. In it’s guise of innocent prayer groups it places “influential men in key places” thereby spreading JESUS throughout the world. But theirs is a Jesus unrecognizable to me or to most Christians whether they be holiday Christians or Evangelicals.

Theirs is Jesus unfettered by scipture, focused on the 'global picture' and therefore unconcerned about the tiny players (read you and me, the poor, the victims of dictators) and unhindered it seems by common sense. I didn't realize as I started this, but perhaps that is why I was thinking of World Citizen by Sylvian:
We raise the men
Who run the fascist states
And we sell them arms
So they maintain their place

We turn our backs
On the things they've done
Their human rights record
And the guns they run

Their concern is with "key men" in high places. That is, their belief is that God has "chosen" some men to have power (they must be chosen by God, right? Else why would they have power?) and that those chosen should be prayed over and with to spread Christianity, or rather complete loyalty to Jesus as they avoic the "Christian" label as they find it "off-putting." This is not proselytizing in the traditional sense, this is a new world order.

They take as their inspiration the story of King David, chosen by God despite what we would consider evil and sinful behavior. In fact, Governor Sanford (a member of The Family) referenced King David in his strange, rambling apology for his infidelity and deception of his family and his constituents.

I have always had a problem with the story of King David. Why should this sinful and proud man be so beloved by God. I try to rationalize it as C.S. Lewis, the great Christian apologist does by saying that an all-powerful God is beyond our comprehension, so his actions cannot be limited by human sensibilities.

But it falls kind of flat. This is one of the cenral tenants of The Family. That these petty sins of minor men are unimportant for the 'great men' who are 'loyal' to God.

This means that they celebrate Hitler, Lenin and Stalin as men who 'got it'--the uniting and leading of men. They befriend and supposedly pray with dictators such as Suharto of Indonesia. The crimes against humanity are nothing compared with power. That's why men like Sanford or John Ensign seem to have so little real remorse and do not resign. After all they have a greater good to do.

But The Family is not limited by party lines. It's members are Democrats as well as Republicans. Independents as well as party-liners. All united by their sense of being chosen. It is Ayn Randism with the face of God. Even Hilary Clinton has participated in The Family's prayer breakfasts although she is not one of the elite.

At its very mildest it is an old boy network providing a ladder for those hoping to rise in politics. The author, Jeff Sharlet, begins his story in one of the family's houses, Ivanwald, with other young men, some Christian some just looking for a leg up.

American Actresses vs. the Brits

2010-05-21T14:48:00.003-04:00

Past weekend, watched “The French Lieutenant’s Woman.” I had read the novel ages ago, and the screenplay even further back.

Must say that I was disappointed. I found it very flat with the exception of Jeremy Iron’s rformance. I love Irons (Brideshead, of course, and in Reversal of Fortune) but have found him passionate only in this Elizabeth I.

It was amusing to see British actors who went on to bigger and better or at least more amusing roles--Leo McKern, Richard Griffiths, and Penelope Wilton known to Doctor Who fans as Harriet Jones. But I was very disappointed in Meryl Streep. For all her fame in accents, I found hers uneven and unconvincing in this.

Which brings up the question, why, when Hollywood is perfectly willing to cast British actors as Brits (and often as Americans) is it so reluctant to cast British actresses as Brits??? Particularly iconic British roles—like this one or Bridget Jones for example. Australians as Americans thrive in Hollywood, and it does not turn around and cast Americans as Australians—Cate Blanchett gets to play an Australian although Nicole Kidman played a Brit in Australia. If it is name recognition then why did Collin Firth get to be in Bridget Jones?

But then, why ask why—Hollywood has been doing it to Asians forever, from “The Good Earth” to the Chinese as Japanese in the excruciating “Memoirs of a Geisha.” Japanese actresses should actually be glad that they weren’t associated with that travesty.

Oh, and speaking of travesties, Uma Thurman as Emma Peel. Not to mention it remains a touchstone for me of terrible films--as in, at least it wasn't as bad as The Avengers.

Even More on Social Media and Human Behavior

2010-05-21T14:41:00.002-04:00

Do you casually put up anything that comes to mind on Facebook/Twitter, Twitter being designed for this, or do you put some thought into provocative, humorous or controversial statements, hoping for comments or re-Tweets?

I prefer Facebook because a) more of my friends are on it, and b) because it invites lengthier and more diverse conversation, sometimes between friends who don’t otherwise know each other from different parts of one’s life, between high school friends, college friends and Boston friends for example. I prefer the conversation. And find myself irrationally unhappy when I don’t get it.

Do you also worry about when to stop commenting? If you have the last word have you been selfish, or so dull that you are conversation ending? If you do not leave the last comment, then have you been rude and abrupt?

If no one comments then are you unpopular, dull or simply lost in the rush. Which leads to my own low-self esteem general question, “Do my friends really like me?”

I find it humorous that posts that where I expect many comments get none, and toss away, random posts especially if concerned with the domestic get multiple responses. I suppose it is commonality. Not having children I tend to refrain from commenting on those posts, and I find it limits my engagement somewhat, to my regret. A friend in blogging once commented that parents have infinite sources for blog posts, while we childless have somewhat less. I could post Guinness’ antics and Mephisto’s foibles, I suppose, but they are rather repetitive.

Do other people worry about such things, or is it just me?

A Musical Hierarchy

2010-05-21T14:25:00.002-04:00

Do other people have a music hierarchy? When listening to the radio in the car and you are faced with the choices of two acceptable songs or even two songs in general, what determines which one you stop on?

For instance, for me from this past week, Muse trumps Red Hot Chili Peppers but loses to Death Cab for Cutie, particularly if it’s from the new album of both, but Red Hot Chili Peppers would come before Oasis, for example. Alternative 80’s (Cure, Depeche, Duran (of course), Human League (except for Human—God, I hate that song), etc. wins out much of the time except for really new songs that I adore.

Between “Sometime Around Midnight” by The Airborne Toxic Event and “Little Lion Man” by Mumford and Sons, both songs that just slay me, the later would probably win because it is newer and I haven’t heard it as much.

There are artists who, if they are the only choice, lose to commercials or even to silence. Coldplay, for example, or James Taylor or (shudder) John Mayer. And this isn’t even counting artists that I don’t even know, or simply dislike as a type—country, country lite (Lady Antebellum), most R&B, much top 40.

Though choosy, I am much more egalitarian than my husband. I will nostalgically stop on Hall and Oates (this morning) or Phil Collins, while my husband would probably rather stick his head out the window in on-coming traffic. Off the top of my head, I can’t think of artists that he would listen to that I wouldn’t, at least not any that would be played on the radio. For a short time, for some reason, every time my husband was in the car with me a Jane’s Addiction song would come on—either ‘Been Caught Stealing’ or ‘Jane Says’—and while we both mildly like Jane’s Addiction it grew almost frustrating.

This also leaves aside the question of whether you will sit in the car and listen to a song that you have on MP3 not a foot away, or could go inside and listen to on CD. For the most part I mainly plug in the MP3 but for short trips it seems silly, and how else would I hear new music to sample?

Ah, well, there’s always NPR.

Addendum:
There's a radio show on the alternative station (sort of) in Boston at lunch time called "Left-Over Lunch" that plays 80's and 90's music for an hour. And today on the way back from the mechanic I got to hear:
Age of Consent by New Order (which I don't have on MP3)
Ever Fallen in Love (Buzzcocks--also don't have)
This is Radio Clash (which I do have)

Sweetness!

Also got to hear Interpol's Slow Hands after the hour was up. Which I do have but it proves the above.

English vs. the World

2010-05-21T13:20:00.003-04:00

Part of my curiosity about language stems from a book that I’m reading called “The Story of English” from the 80’s BBC series of the same name.

In it, it is postulated that English is uniquely capable of expressing such nuances because it is such a polyglot language—sometimes welcomingly and sometimes hesitantly or even actively resisted—developed from multiple sources and languages and is therefore so vocabulary rich that it is (arguably) unrivaled in its ability to say the same thing in multiple ways and as in my previous post, to say something different with the same words.

According to the book, the OED lists 500,000 words and there are almost a million technical and scientific specific words uncatalogued, with new words being developed every day. And this book dates from the 80’s. As science continues to expand the number is probably higher now.

In contrast, the estimates for German are 185,000 words, and for French, 100,000 including borrowings from English. The French have, of course, attempted to keep their language pure, but have been unable to stem the tide. The Japanese gleefully adopt English words (and Engrish words) to the chagrin of Japanese traditionalists. Or, like the Germans create polysyllabic, tongue twistery portmanteau words to cover new situations. You see, I can create the word ‘tongue-twistery’ for my sentence and know that I will not be considered illiterate by my readers. The verbing of nouns, the commonnizing of trade marks (band aid, Kleenex, etc.) are all marks of English. See my post on David Mitchell’s “Cloud Atlas” for more on that trend.

Henry Higgins was perhaps exaggerating when he said in 'My Fair Lady' (words written by the American Alan Jay Lerner):
"The majesty and grandeur of the English language.... It's the greatest possession we have. The noblest thoughts that ever flowed through the hearts of men are contained in its extraordinary,
imaginative and musical mixtures of sounds."

Shakespeare alone created multiple and varied words without regard to convention.
"Shakespeare put the vernacular to work and showed those who came after what could be done with it. He filled the universe with words. Accommodation, assassination, dexterously, dislocate, indistinguishable, obscene, pedant, premeditated, reliance and submerged..."--The Story of English.

This is not my post about the book—I’ll do one when I finish the book, but my question remains. Am I, like Higgins nationalistic and selfishly attached to and proud of English because it is in all senses (though not absolutely) my mother tongue? Having dabbled now in three other languages, but hardly scratched their surface (a note for another day—how many cliché’s are in this piece and how many clichés as shown above come from Shakespeare, still resonating despite their overuse because they are fundamentally true and perfectly metaphoric). I want to know how other languages compare. What are their strengths? Their weaknesses.

In another life I would have liked to have been a linguist or a studier of semiotics like Umberto Eco. Etymology fascinates me.

Well, I have rambled on enough and run-on sentenced enough on this topic for today. I await your answers.

Nuances of meaning

2010-05-21T10:25:00.002-04:00

This previous post is one of my favorite David Sylvian songs and I was thinking about it's meaning. There are such subtle shadings in English, for example:

His world is suffering
Her world is suffering

Our world is suffering

They can all mean that THE world is suffering, mother earth physically suffering, but it can also mean that all he or she knows is suffering, that all of the world means suffering.

Likewise, in The Cure song, "The End of the World" Robert Smith sings:
‘I couldn't ever love you more’

Meaning I could not love you more than I do. It is impossible for me to love you more.

Later, he sings:
‘It’s not my fault, you couldn’t love me more’

Meaning isn’t it sad that you couldn’t love me more. You were incapable of loving me more, or as much as was needed. Of course, it is possible that she couldn’t love him more because it was impossible for her to love him more.

Also, in The Barenaked Ladies song, “Tonight is the Night I Fell Asleep at the Wheel” Steven Page sings:

‘You're the last thing that's on my mind’

Meaning at the beginning of the song, I wasn’t thinking of you.

But by the end (as he is dying—sorry all of these examples are such downers) it means that she is the last thing that he is thinking of as he dies.

So my question for all of my multi-lingual friends is what are the subtleties of other languages that hinge on inflection?

And for everyone, what are some other examples of these dual meanings.

When in doubt, David Sylvian

2010-05-21T10:22:00.001-04:00

World Citizen

World Citizen
(Words by David Sylvian)

There goes one baby's life
It's such a small amount
She's un-American
I guess it doesn't count

Six thousand children's lives
Were simply thrown away
Lost without medicine
Inside of thirty days

In the New York harbour
Where the stock's withheld
It was the price we paid
For a safer world

World is suffering
World is suffering
World is suffering
World citizen

In Madhya Pradesh
Where they're building dams
They're displacing native people
From their homes and lands

So they hunger strike
Cos they believe they count
To lose a single life
Is such a small amount

In the name of progress
And democracy
The concepts represented in name only

His world is suffering
Her world is suffering
Their world is suffering
World citizen

World citizen

And the buildings fall
In a cloud of dust
And we ask ourselves
How could they hate us?
Well, when we live in ignorance and luxury
While our super powers practice
Puppet mastery

We raise the men
Who run the fascist states
And we sell them arms
So they maintain their place

We turn our backs
On the things they done
Their human rights record
And the guns they run

His world is suffering
Her world is suffering
Their world is suffering
World citizen

My world is suffering
Your world is suffering
Our world is suffering
World citizen

Who'll do away with flags?
Who'll do us proud?
Remove the money from their pockets
Scream dissent out loud?

Cos god ain't on our side
The shoe won't fit
And though they think the war is won
That's not the last of it

Disenfranchised people
Need their voices heard
And if no one stops to listen
Lose their faith in words

And violence rises
When all hope is lost
Who'll embrace the human spirit
And absorb the cost?

Not one life is taken
In my name
In my name

His world is suffering
Her world is suffering
Their world is suffering
World citizen

My world is suffering
Your world is suffering
Our world is suffering
World citizen

King Jesus

2010-05-03T19:23:00.003-04:00

Robert Graves' King Jesus is a dense, sometimes difficult, thought-provoking and ultimately frustrating novel. Written as a history by one Agabus some 50 years after Jesus' death, it posits several controversial ideas about the life and death of Jesus.

First he discards the virgin birth (let alone the Catholic addition of the Immaculate Conception), suggesting instead that Jesus was the product of a secret marriage between Mary, a temple Ward, (whose own parentage owed more to ancient pagan sexual rites, than to Jewish custom) and a son of Herod, and therefore had the earthly right to be called the King of the Jews. But the historian also makes the argument that Jesus was the Messiah based on many writings of the Jewish prophets. Interestingly, while he dismisses the virgin birth as too mystical, comparing it to Greek and Roman mythology--making Jesus no more than Perseus, fathered by Zeus in the form of a shower of gold (I don't think there's a 21st century meaning there)--he leaves the central miracle of Jesus' life--documenting it, without endorsing it or dismissing it--the resurrection, but more about that later.

What the book primarily does, through Graves' startling knowledge of Greek, Roman and Hebrew history and texts, is to expose how many of those rites and mysteries that the Christians and Jews celebrate have their roots in much older Pagan religions. Most of us know that Christmas was to supplant the celebration of the Winter Solstice, and Easter is drawn from various European traditions of Beltaine, Walpurgis and Eostre, but Graves digs deeper, comparing the rite of communion with the symbolic digestion of the organs in Egyptian mythology among others. The mythology of many religions and cultures feature the sacrifice of a Son or the resurrection of a son into a father.

But what I find most fascinating is that Graves, an atheist, does not dismiss the resurrection, and while he finds practical explanations for Jesus' miracles, the final and ultimate miracle--the point of Christianity itself, he leaves alone.

But perhaps the most interesting/disturbing thing is that his Jesus has come to defeat the feminine in all her guises--not just the ancient cults such as Lilith, but all feminine--only by defeating the feminine can the kingdom of heaven be born on earth. That it was not the apple of knowledge that doomed Adam and Eve, but Eve's insistence on sex and motherhood. He urges his disciples to live with their wives as brother and sister. He takes a bride--Mary, sister of Martha and Lazarus--but despite her wishes, he will not consummate the relationship. They are the holy king and queen, but he has not been consumed by her--she is subjugated to him.

Mary Magdalene is seen as a combination of all the derogatory version of her through history--she is not just a prostitute but a Madam, a witch and possessed by demons that Jesus drives out. There is a long passage describing a debate between Jesus and Mary where she describes the Pagan and he re-translates it into Jewish prophesy, eventually bringing her to his side.

Rather than being an overthrower of Jewish law and tradition, Jesus is described as being the surest defender of the law in the tradition of Rabbi Hillel. This too is a contrast with the "Hippie" Jesus who comes to break with all that has gone before.

It is important to note that this book was written in 1946 and that Graves had something of an obsession with the early feminine cults:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_White_Goddess

It is not, to my mind, nearly Graves' best book, lacking the humor and realism of the two Claudian novels or the self-depreciating wit of his autobiographical "Good-bye to All That." Still it shakes up the traditional notions and encourages questioning.

My observation--social media (again)

2010-03-10T14:10:00.001-05:00

Facebook is a conversation. Twitter is an exciting but crowded cocktail party of which you catch the pieces of conversations.

Personal stuff again

2010-03-10T14:01:00.002-05:00

It has been a good two days. Although it's still crisp/cold for me, the sun is shining and it's still light when I drive home (even better with Daylight Savings coming). I was productive at home and feel energetic about projects for the first time in ages.

But here's the dilemma--I have been here (that sense of a real space again) before. Where I clean and begin projects and feel good and optimistic and the real problems I have seem smaller and beyond my control so I worry less.

And it always ends. Am I mildly bi-polar? Is it possible to be mildly bi-polar? Bi-polar seems so much the diagnosis of the moment that I am wary of using it.

And each time I think, how can I cling to this and make it last and is that even under my control.

Life during Peace

2010-03-10T13:49:00.003-05:00

Watched Before Night Falls, always wanted to see it, partially because it garnered so much praise, and partially because I had heard about Johnny Depp's daring performance in it, and I wanted to see that.

But it is Javier Bardem's movie--every second, from the young student with high hopes for Castro's revolution who is quickly disillusioned by the brutal crack downs (just as in Persepolis) for both his writing and his homosexuality. Are all revolutions doomed to betray themselves?

It is a harrowing and beautiful film with Bardem reading Arenas own words in the original language. I cannot now remember how much of the film was in Spanish and how much in English, it flowed so beautifully together.

It made me want to read the writer--what more can a film do for a writer?

Times of War

2010-03-01T16:10:00.002-05:00

I recently watched Persepolis, The Reader, and Hotel Rwanda, each in their own way about living through war and the things we do to survive. How much would you do, what would you do, most importantly, what would you do to survive.

Persepolis is the story of a girl/young woman, growing up in the aftermath of the fall of the Shah. At the beginning her liberal parents are full of hope for the new regime, but it is soon clear that the western freedoms enjoyed under the Shah are gone. They fear for their daughter's outspoken protest, and yet, it is at their knee that she has learned to speak up. Our heroine is packed off to Vienna where she gets into the kind of troubles that a young woman alone in a strange city might be prone to--fights with landlords, as she puts them, banal love affairs. Hers is an easy war, even when she returns, until one of her friends is killed running from a mixed (illegal) party. The war is a background to them until it collides with them and they live as if it is a distant thing as much as possible. Persepolis is animated, by the way, in a glorious black and white that echoes the book.

What can be said about Hotel Rawanda, beyond the obvious--this is a heart and gut-wrenching movie of personal bravery in the face of unbelievable odds. Could I be capable of such bravery when it would be so easy to bribe a few people and save my own family? The most telling line:
'You're not even 'ni**ers' you're Africans.' In other words the West has no reason to help you and they're not coming.

The Reader is a harder question if not a harder movie to watch. Boy has affair with older woman that shapes every relationship he has after only to find that she was a Nazi. He has info. that could get her a reduced sentence--that she is illiterate--which she is too ashamed to use in her defence and does not use it during the trial, but then sends her tapes of him reading--as they did when he was her lover--through her incarceration. We share his sympathy with her, and yet we are stuck with and lost with her crimes--that she sent women to their deaths repeatedly, many whom she had read to her. Her final act and his final question leave the watcher, as lost as he is.

Spoiled

2010-02-26T13:57:00.001-05:00

I am so used to coming into a warm house because of our timers, I had to get under the covers when I came home in the middle of the day.

How I wish for spring/summer.

Succeeding in Social Media

2010-02-25T21:36:00.001-05:00

To succeed in Social Media be pithy.

Often.

It is not, as the reoccurring joke goes about writing about feeding the cat, it is finding something interesting to say, not unlike a social gathering, like a party, only you don't really have to face people.

This is not particularly pithy, or original and will be swallowed by the great sound of other things.

But at least I'm here again.

Absent, not Dead.

Social Networking Cont.

2009-11-04T16:33:00.001-05:00

Do the common people who throw their coins in the fountain, as it were, expect an answer, or is it enough for them to be part of the zeitgeist, with the occasional random chance that Neil Gaiman or Amanda Palmer or someone might respond. Do they want a response from other nobodies?

Facing my Mother's Death

2009-10-28T10:06:00.002-04:00

Back in 2007 I posted this:

http://noveleye.blogspot.com/2007/08/mortality-part-2.html

and she's still here. Turning 85 today. So she's already lived a more than a year beyond the diagnosis. But something's different. She seems ready to die now. And it's hardening/closing faster, leaving her short of breath. I had to go down and clean up her apt. so she could come home from rehab after a small heart attack and small stroke that have left her blind in one eye. There's so much I could write about it, but I'm still processing--what I feel, what I need. They are saying six months now.

We finally had that sort of peace that I was looking for. And now I hate myself for all the wasted years, but I can't do that. They might have been exactly as I feared they would be--all anger and pain. But now I need more time, more time, and that is what we never get.

Childhood's End

2009-10-15T14:19:00.002-04:00

I'm cleaning out my mother's apartment. She's not dead yet, but they say it's just a matter of time. And it needs to be clean before she can come out of rehab. My mother is a hoarder. My mother is a hoarder's hoarder. We've carted 2 station wagons worth to the thrift store, and this is a three room apartment. We've barely begun. I found a box of Christmas ornaments from my childhood and sat down and cried.

I'm finding it hard to function--both because it's a daunting task, and because it renders everything so futile. If we will all end up like this then why should we buy anything now. Much talk with my therapist about this. That we buy things to make us happy now--the future is the future and many people (not my mother) start to weed as they get older--finding less and less that objects are important. I am already less of a purchaser and I have never been the hoarder that my mother is. A collector, perhaps, but when things don't fit in shelves, they have to go. Zen teaches the release of all things--that even emotions are fleeting things, certainly objects are.

But added to the simple stress of cleaning an overcrowded apartment, is being face-to-face with the death of my last parent. That I must deal with all the pieces that she has used to get herself through, and that I will suddenly be no one's child. There will be nothing between myself and my own mortality. Not that there ever really is, but we lie to ourselves. My mother is 85. It's hardly a tragedy to die at her age, she is two generations removed from me, but at the same time, it is relatively early in my time with her--when friends parents are young and robust at 60 or 65 now. And I have deliberately kept myself away from her, so what years we had are lost.

My therapist says too that I cannot blame myself for that either--that I did what I needed to do to protect myself, but my guilt and stress, blame and anger does not respond to such intellectual reasoning.

The Darkness at Noon

2009-08-02T19:00:00.004-04:00

I haven't been here in a while.

Isn't it funny how we describe some of the sites as if they were rooms or places--physical space.

June and July were...hard. It rained almost non-stop in June, and perhaps half the time in July. It's raining today. And I could not outrun my black dogs.

I suffer from depression. I think I've made that pretty clear on here. Most of the time it's just a general sorrow--a little more effort to be happy or functioning. The past two months have been major darkness. An inability to see much good in anything--a hopelessness, a lack of dreams for the future. If you've never been there (another sense of a physical location) then you cannot understand.

Oddly, just before it went dark I went to see one of my favorite bands, The Psychedelic Furs in concert. I'd only waited 25 years for the chance. They were old, of course, but sounded good and the setting was intimate. I had no expectations and thus enjoyed myself very much. The only funny thing was how happy the lead singer seemed to be. He smiled all the time--like he'd discovered Prozac.

Now this is a gloom and doom sort of band. So seeing him smile seemed, discordant. And it related to something on Bones (the show), where the phychiatrist played by Stephen Fry said that no-matter how depressed or nihilistic a dark band seems, somehow they create something--the anti nihilism. They express themselves.

And I've heard other depressed actors talk about their struggles, and my question is--HOW DO THEY DO IT? When I'm depressed I can barely get out of bed. Everything seems pointless. The voices in my head say that I won't get that role, I won't write anything good, etc. And so I do nothing.

How do they channel their darkness--some with drugs both legal and illegal, but my legal drugs make little impact and the illegal will take you down eventually.

South Station

2009-07-10T12:42:00.001-04:00

Amidst the craptastic cullinary choices, I watch an Asian gentleman consume an elaborate meal from what appears to be a thermos, but is really a beautifully packaged set of small containers complete with chopsticks.Like all terminuses (termini, locaii?) the range of humanity is broad but shallow. Behind me I hear, "Ich bin jahre. Alles klar." The elegantly dressed, the ethnic, the eccentric. A young woman goes by in an outfit I could have used for the Vietnam play-all tie-dye and patches.

You know you're listening to too much Psychedelic Furs when...

2009-06-23T14:01:00.002-04:00

you write this:

I tried to kill a f*#&ing hour today.
It struggled in my arms

And when I thought I had a grip
I found I held nothing.

I cling to the idea...

2009-06-15T22:42:00.001-04:00

...that I am a late bloomer.

Star Trek

2009-06-15T22:29:00.002-04:00

The new Star Trek (which is now old) is fantastic and FAN-tastic as well. Friend T who missed the Trekkiedom in all its forms still enjoyed it, and those of us who worshiped Star Trek for 30+ years--well, it kept the essence and was a damn good ride as well.

And the core is Zachary Quinto as Spock. Spock is my favorite character--always has been. I heart Spock, and Quinto seems born to play young Spock (although he is only a few years younger than Nimoy was when he took the role originally). Quinto outside of Spock does not interest me in the least, by the way.

Star Trek succeeds because at its core are a group of great characters, and this movie gave each of them their own space--even if it is not "true" to the original origin stories. I am not so bothered by that. The friendship of Kirk and Spock, Spock's divided nature--all there.

Sometimes I wonder if my fondness for Spock comes from my own feelings of division, but a tiny look at ST fan fiction for all 43 years of its existence shows that many women are drawn to Spock. Is it the House problem? Women want to save the wounded. Kirk doesn't need us, but Spock does? I even do not mind the romance of Spock and Uhura, although it certainly breaks canon--both for the humor it provides, and for the added vulnerability it brings. That Uhura can love the emotionless Spock and he her. Majel Barrett got it when she created Nurse Chapel's long unrequited love for Spock. She was all of us--yearning and hoping.

Seeing the movie has drawn me back to a book I loved as a child--perhaps the first piece of quality fan fiction to come out of the show--Star Trek: The New Voyages. I read it over and over along with Nimoy's I am Not Spock. The stories are personal and sad, and explore emotions in a way that was not always possible in the show, particularly in 1966. By 1976, the year of the book, much more could be described and explored, including, interestingly, a torture story that leaves Kirk shattered.

The first story is about Spock literally divided into two beings, the Vulcan and the human and his realization that neither can exist without the other. Is that true of my division? That I am who I am because of it?

Another weekend, another quilt top

2009-05-17T19:08:00.005-04:00

I'm having a vote for the title of this one--again from random collected fabrics.

Choices are:

a) Cats in the Crypt

b) At Play in the Boneyard

c) Kitties in the Graveyard

Novel being creative

2009-05-10T20:45:00.009-04:00

I've been creative these last few weekends. There are a lot of reasons--some pharmaceutical, some not.

So I've been crafting. First I made a chatelaine.

Chatelaines were used in the middle ages as a sort of pocket (pockets are a very recent invention). The idea was re-embraced in the Victorian era (of course). Housekeepers would keep them on their belts with useful items. I'd been thinking about making one for a while because of my Steampunk fascination. Then when I found the little scissors pendant I knew I had to.
Mine has scissors, a needle case, a paperclip which is holding a suede envelope with safety pins and straight pins. There's a little metal envelope at the top with a little metal letter in it (I had it and I didn't know what to use it for. Mine can be clipped on or the safety pin can be pinned to the clothes. Mainly I'm keeping it on the end table to sew in front of the tv.
Here's a real one:
http://www.nps.gov/history/museum/exhibits/grko/exb/Family/Kohrs/grko2522_chatelaine.html

Then I made a bag for my new yoga mat. It has a pocket for a towel and for yoga socks. A water bottle can clip on, but it rattles a bit. I made it just the right size, but I should have made the circumference a little bigger so I could just slip the mat in and out more easily. Live and learn.

I made this out of the left overs from the black and white quilt.

Finally I made a quilt top--I don't have backing for it yet, but I do have binding. It's chaotic but I'm trying to learn to embrace the art of chaos. Of not over planning. I call it "A Riot of Dogs (and some cats)." Originally it was going to be dogs and cats, but this is what it wanted to be. There's a little orange cat on one of the prints, but the rest are all dogs.

Basically, I collected any dog and cat fabric that appealed to me for the last few years--fat quarters, regular remnants and quarters. I also collected paw prints and bones prints because I knew I'd have to break up the patterns somehow. The border I did buy a yard of. It has no animals, just dog accessories (sorry the shot is blurry--normally I'm a better photographer).

I had no pattern in mind. Originally I was going to frame individual dogs but the fabrics were too random. Then I was going to box them. In the last few months I'd been taking them out and playing with them to see if anything came to me. I started to notice that some paired up naturally and some could be made to pair up and that's when I decided on the triangles. I cut the triangles at random, I matched them loosely by color and then laid them out in the pinwheels. And it all worked out. Weird but true. Listen to the fabric and it will tell you what it wants to be.

Now I have to finish it--which I hate. And then decide what to do with all the cat pieces.

Personal Pizza (parody)

2009-05-10T20:43:00.001-04:00

Your own personal pizza
Something to fill your needs
Something with cheese...

Feeling a jones
And you're all alone
Stomach moan
By the telephone
Lift up the receiver
You know that they deliver

Your own personal pizza
Something to fill your needs
Something with cheese

Reach out and touch dough
Reach out and touch dough
--Novel "Weird Al" West(with apologies to Depeche Mode)

Plan-It Green

2009-05-04T21:17:00.001-04:00

There's a game I played recently with the above name. It's a variation on Build-a-Lot where you are a real estate developer. On each level you have different goals-build/upgrade so many houses, reach a certain rental income (unrealistically collected each day), etc. This one, as the title implies, involves making things eco friendly. You add solar panels, water reclamation, etc. Then you track the carbon savings, energy efficiency, etc. Wouldn't that be nice, if developers swept in and improved neighborhoods? But does everyone want an eco garden? Or to bike to work? And of course, in the real world these improvements are competing with many other types of services. It's sad, because this kind of long term planning is ultimately cost efficient, but getting there faces so many obstacles, not the least of which is the human right not to work in our long term best interest.

More Watchmen

2009-04-30T23:21:00.001-04:00

A friend commented on my quickie review that he didn't know why the rest of the team tolerates the Comedian. For that matter, why do they tolerate Rorshach? Psychopaths both. Is the answer that Laurie and Dan are actually more like them than unlike them-that they all need the masks to show their faces? Certainly Dr. Manhattan has lost touch with humanity as has Veidt.Who watches the Watchmen indeed. And their acceptance of Veidt's answer is eerie. Except, of course for Rorshach who has ignored trial by jury and other civil liberties for so long but cannot accept lying.

Watchmen

2009-04-29T07:45:00.001-04:00

We finally went to see it last night. In the same theater-same room even-where we so V for Vendetta.We liked it very much. And as I mentioned, my husband loves the book. I agree with most of the critics. The soundtrack was bold and sometimes too obvious, it's long and slow, and Laurie seemed young-but not unrealistically so. The 80s were a character in a way they couldn't be in the book-the effect of distance, rather like in Ashes to Ashes (bbc show). Rorshach was frighteningly perfect. I thought them all well cast, even Adrian-he's something of a cipher in the book as well.

While I'm uploading pictures...

2009-04-25T19:20:00.003-04:00

This is a doll that I made for my husband. I meant it to be ready at Christmas, and I got everything except the apron done. Then it took me three months to get the apron done. D'Oh. It's the character Schnitzel from Cartoon Network's show Chowder. Schnitzel only says Rada Rada--it translates for everything:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PtlqKUwdqqc (about 5:13).

I put in a sound disc that plays "Rada rada, raaada," when you push on his tummy.

No reason, just amused me to do so.

The greatest day of Guinness' life

2009-04-25T19:16:00.003-04:00

When after 11 years, Mephisto let Guinness put his head on Mephisto's butt to sleep. They've slept next to each other over the years, but never quite this.

I love how they almost form a yin-yang. I came downstairs and they were on the couch. Guinness was awake and raised his eyes to me as I reached for the camera in a way that seemed to say, "Don't ruin this for me."

In the end, it was Guinness who moved away first.

You know it's a good concert when...

2009-04-25T18:54:00.003-04:00

...you come home with glitter in your shoes.

Spur of the moment, went to see the last night of a local "Rock and Roll Rumble" for Boston bands because a friend was in one of the finalists and Betamo had sent me the video for C*Star earlier (explicit). The new single is much better.

http://www.myspace.com/genedantestarlets

Post glam Bowie inspired--great fun. Turns out the lead singer wanted to be an actor and may have been in stuff with other friends.

The little pack was a freebie. It contains: a sticker, a chapstick with Gene Dante logo, an XL condom, lube and a mint. Guess you're all set with this in your pocket, although I think he was being optimistic about his fans.

Much glam fanservice (for Musing) including coming out at the end with a paper cup that he seemed to be drinking from and just as I turned to scream to whisper to Betamo that if he were really J-Pop he'd throw the water on us (we were about two people back from the stage) he tossed the cup which was full of glitter. Very fun.

Hope the band does well. No word on whether they won. (My friend is the gothic looking guitarist).

I'd never been to this kind of event for local bands--local bands tend to be, for me, like best of anthologies, or comedy nights. Such a mixed bag, that sifting through the dreck for the stuff I like is not worth it. The crowd was fascinating. Most were not young--my age and older, much older. Every t-shirt imaginable, from Bob Dylan to Violet Nine (another local band). From Bettie Page to Homestar Runner. The tattoos and piercings too ran the gamut. I realized it was networking for them. One gentleman had a piece of paper taped to his back--Drummer for hire--with little tabs to tear off. Betamo's friends said that he would probably get some work. Like a theater party for me and my friends. A scene that I have never seen with the same hugs and exclamations and promises to call when something comes up.

Resolved to post more

2009-04-25T18:48:00.003-04:00

So much to say, so much to share, and time fugits, as it were. Guinness does have diabetes. Husband sick again. Old friend killed herself. That brought other friend to town and has prompted a strange, good and not entirely in my control meeting up with friends. Work busy and even occasionally busy with things I like doing (design, planning) but still the feeling that I'm rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic, as it were.

Have been working out almost regularly as the avatar attests. Both swimming and Pilates. Have been working on managing the weight as well--portion control. Not much weight loss so far, but feel more toned.

Trying to add things in little doses. The tiny steps. One desert skipped today. One more exercise class per week. One piece of trash picked up off the floor. One more friend connected with...

More difficult texts

2009-03-29T00:18:00.002-04:00

One of the interesting side effects about reading books on my phone is that most are part of Project Gutenberg which preserves texts which are out of print, and for the most part, out of copyright, and so I find myself reading things which were published around 1900.

Like The Name of the Rose, I always meant to get back and read G.K. Chesterton and never did. Oh, I read Father Brown, it's short and fairly easy. But not the big stuff, even though most of my heroes (C.S. Lewis, Neil Gaiman) site Chesterton as influence and hero.

And so I found myself reading "The Man Who Was Thursday," (which incidentally explained a variety of references in Neil Gaiman's works). Like TNofTR, it too seems to be a fairly straight forward mystery...and then it goes all pear shaped.

I actually don't have that much to say because I'm still not sure what to make of it. I'd love to hear some thoughts, because I know that some people who read this have read it. It is, in some ways, the anti-thesis to TNofTR, the book that proposes knowledge and reason as a solution to the dark ages, this supposes that religion is a kind of anarchy against the stifling reason of the late 19th century. A liberation and a universe that could only be opened by that first step of faith.

Have you ever seen a picture of Jesus laughing...

2009-03-28T23:54:00.006-04:00

Mmm, do you think
He had a beautiful smile?

A smile that healed
-Why Should I Love You, Kate Bush, The Red Shoes

I finally read The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco. It seems funny that I hadn't read it before now, but I remember deciding to read Foucault's Pendulum many years ago, and then being so overwhelmed that I put off TNOR.

Part of the hesitation was the existence of the movie. The movie, for various reasons, the cast, the time, was printed on my mind. I don't think that Sean Connery was particularly well cast as William of Baskerville (yes, named for both William of Ockham--he allegedly of Ockham's razor--and Sherlock Holmes) but I don't hate him in the part. He made it his.

From the description in the book I could almost picture James Cromwell in the role, but at the time the movie came out, Cromwell was best known for playing the nerd dad in Revenge of the Nerds, so probably wasn't a prime contender. F. Murry Abraham was delightfully well cast, particularly bringing the memory of his Salieri to it. He plays obsessives well.

What is certainly missing from the movie is Ecco's remarkable knowledge and description of the religious/political turmoil of the time and what it meant for the everyday souls.

As Wikipedia puts it:

The Name of the Rose, a novel by Umberto Eco, is a historical
whodunnit — a murder mystery set in an Italian monastery in
the year 1327. It is an intellectual mystery combining semiotics in fiction, biblical
analysis, medieval studies and literary theory.

I didn't annotate it because it was my husbands, and I read it now, over a month ago so much I would like to point out is lost (fitting, perhaps for a post-modern novel and Eco's general points about memory and reality).

One of the central thoughts, and what prompted my use of the Kate Bush lyric above is the possible existence of Aristotle's Comedy. A work that has never been found and which forms the core of the mystery--the killing of people to prevent anyone from reading it.

The curious position of the church on knowledge is described well in the monastery's purpose--which is to copy manuscripts, but also their mission which is to hide those manuscripts which might conflict with church doctrine. One character says that the perfect illuminator would be the one who could not read, but only copies the letters--preserving the object, but ignoring the content.

And comedy, they believe, is a sin--a leading away from God, because if we can laugh at all things, we can laugh at authority--up to God himself. Jesus did not laugh, the blind librarian Jorge cries.

What is truth without context, but doesn't context shape the truth? An easier read than Foucault's Pendulum, it is still as intricate, and dare I say it, labyrinthine?

Expenses

2009-03-28T23:51:00.002-04:00

In the first part of the month, Mephisto was in the hospital, and will be on $125/month medicine for the rest of his life. Now Guinness may have diabetes with all that that entails.

Took the car in for its 30,000 mile check up--good to do, but damn expensive, and the rich wonder why the poor don't invest in maintenance.

All in all, an expensive month--husband's bonus and tax returns all taken up. And what do I cut so that I can save more to get to that mythical nest egg?

The old stuff and junk

2009-03-21T19:25:00.003-04:00

I can't seem to get back into posting every day. First husband was sick, then cat was sick, now I'm sick. Work continues to be less than fulfilling. I have actually been somewhat productive in other ways. I've been only touching Facebook.

I made this:
It's a wall hanging for my b&w and yellow bathroom. I call it "Time in the Labyrinth." I've been collecting the scraps for years although I had to supplement with purchased fabric. The stripe at A5 and C3 came from a sink skirt in our house in western MA. The little checkerboard from a border on another wall hanging. The patterns at C6 and F3 from that purse from last year. I picture it as a sort of game. One can follow the patterns or the dark appliqued path (which is shorter but has more obstacles). One would move one or two spaces using either a coin, button, or perhaps an Othello piece.

I also made a new coat, but I have some finishing to do on it, so hopefully will have a picture tomorrow.

Social Networking, What is it For

2009-03-01T19:47:00.004-05:00

The fastest growing group on Facebook is Gen X--those 35 to 45 finding high school friends. Twittering has become a subject of conversation as Karl Rove begins Twittering and senators were seen frantically texting as the President entered for his address.

I'm on Facebook, Twitter, Linked In and I blog. I also have a MySpace page, but I never really enjoyed MySpace. If you weren't promoting music there didn't seem to be much point to being there. The apps were hard to find and use (to me) and finding friends harder. I keep the page only because I'm following some celebrities there. Most of them are also on Facebook, so eventually I won't need the MySpace page. Facebook is terribly user friendly--it recommends friends, organizations, fandoms for you to join. Your friends tiny updates are brought directly to you as are the updates of the celebrities you follow. It's not terribly customizable, but other than that, apps are painless. Virtually point and click.

Twitter is new. To tell the truth I only joined Twitter because the app. is easier on my G1 than the Facebook app. I can link them through those fun apps and updates on one go on the other. The only problem is that Facebook always has one's name, as in "Novel is..." You can change the verb, but not the name. Twitter can be anything one wants. People write Haikus, other poetry, whole stories--140 characters at a time. There are contests for the best 140 character stories. Or stories that are serialized in these one or two sentences. And that's characters, not words or letters. Double spacing is a waste.

The mad pundits say that Twitter and Facebook will replace blogging, and it may, but I think people will still want the longer form. Many people use Twitter to update people on their blogs. As in Novel just posted a new blog. Then a link. And conveniently, one can make the link short to not use up those valuable 140 characters. I follow famous funny people and a few friends. Some people follow thousands of people, or drop in and out of conversations. This flowing stream of thoughts, ideas, trivia, mundanity. Some posts are just hilarious--Neil Gaiman always writes funny little thoughts. Most people post links to other things. And then the hope is to be "re-twittered," have people link to your Tweets.

One can agonize about the "right" way to use these new mediums (or to use them at all, of course) but there is no "right" way. It's being learned and developed each step of the way. Since I use my real name there, connecting with old friends has been ... strange and sometimes deeply enhancing. I have found people who were my best friends in elementary school. Who moved away and lost touch. I have become closer to peple with whom I was only casually aquainted. Of course, I have also been friended by people with whom I was barely friends, some I actively disliked. At first, as people generally do, I accepted every friending. But around Christmas I started unfriending people and ignoring requests from some people. Someone described it as a form of class reunion. The hearty, "Wow, how are you, you look great, what have you been up to..." followed by a, "I'm going to the bar now," or "Hey, I need to go say hi to so and so..." One is "friended" but that doesn't mean that one cares. Even worse is the friending by people one does not remember at all. The name sounds familiar and one peers at the tiny picture that one is given trying to de-age them 20, 25 years and guess who they might have been.

One friend posts cryptic messages like this, "Jason is apropos of nothing." What's funny is things for which I expect comments seldom get them, and other throw away things will get many. Most of my college friends are professors, no surprise, and nearly all friends from childhood and college have children. My high school boyfriend, who is not on Facebook, but a mutual friend is, is married with several children and is a doting father. When I heard that I was reminded of The Airborne Toxic Event lyric, "They tell me that/you're married now/well, my dear, I fear/I cannhot understand how." It seems so alien to the person I knew, but 20 years change us all.

I did not have children. I did not become a professor and I did not go to New York to act. As in most things, I veer between depression at my life choices, brought home by others actions, and the enrichment at refinding friends. It is a study, for anyone who wants to, of how we do and do not become the people we meant to be, or thought we would be. How life changes and disrupts the best laid plans, for better and worse. The thing that can never be explained to one at 18 or 20. Some people are divorced, but less than one might think.

Of course, just like a class reunion, one is hardly going to go on and say, "My marriage collapsed in a bitter divorce, I'm living paycheck to paycheck and I don't know what to do." We boost our elevator speech, and gloss over bits and we know that others are doing it too.

Speaking of elevator speeches, Linked In is the serious cousin. The one where you don't post pictures of oneself at parties with a drink in hand. You post your resume and list work accomplishments, and try to connect with as many people as possible in the "networking" sense.

If you Yahoo my name, my Linked In comes up first. Which is a good thing. The weird thing about Linked In for me right now, is trying to use it to find a job while not alerting my current employers (who are on Linked In).

So what does all of this mean--what does it add up too. Too much distraction, too much information. Well, you can always walk away for a short time. Some people join and then don't seem to check back in for months. Others seem to spend every minute finding friends and sending apps. I probably fall somewher in the middle. One Monday morning I sTwittered that I hadn't Twittered all weekend and the world hadn't ended. And a friend wrote back, "how do you know?
For instance, I can let you know that I am at the animal hospital right now with my cat. It is possible that I will get. Instantaneous messages about that. Again, though, what is it for. To be continued...

The Fine Art of the Western

2009-03-01T19:38:00.003-05:00

The western as genre is generally a film style that you either love or loathe, and I really only gained an appreciation for westerns in film class. One must submerge/submit oneself to the archetypes presented.

My husband has little patience for them--they are stories to be watched at that is all. We ended up watching two relatively close to each other.

The first, the remake of 3:10 to Yuma was fairly straightforward--most interesting for the fine acting of the two leads who, of course, are not American. And the Western is American, although the best of them borrow from other myths as archetypes are archetypes for a reason.

The second was The Assassination of Jesse James... I can't say that I liked it. In most good westerns the landscape--the west--is a character, as real and as important as any human as cities are in the stories I mentioned below. I say West, but of course, Jesse James was from my childhood home--KC, MO area. Like a student film, we watched long shots of waving prairie grass, rolling hills, and... I didn't care. The first half of the film is unbearably boring and the last is rushed.

But what is the fascination with the Western? With cowboys and outlaws, gunslingers? Is it the appeal of the outlaw with the heart of gold? That men want to be him and women want to be with him? Or vice-a-versa as the case may be. That idea that in order to survive in an unjust world, these noble men must break the law. It was certainly enough for Joss Whedon to create his space western--Firefly. Is it part of the appeal of House? Or vampires. The new vampires, not Nosferatu, all hunger and id, but the erotic vampires of Ann Rice and Twilight who suffer torment over what they must do, and in the end are always alone.

The truth is that none of these men are actually what they seem. In reality one would not want to date a man like House, a cowboy or a vampire. Their needs, their emptiness, would be torturous and would override all else. Yet they are larger than the men in reality. Their very damage is what makes us admire them more than the average schlubs we encounter daily. John Wayne's obsession in The Searchers seems admirable. In reality we would wonder why.

Back atcha to Matt

2009-03-01T01:29:00.001-05:00

Here's a great site that my husband found while looking for fonts--I've gotten so much from it already--worth it if only for the monthly calendar wallpapers:

www.smashingmagazine.com

What it started

2009-03-01T00:48:00.002-05:00

I've mentioned elsewhere that I love fantastic fiction--think it the most important genre. All the same, I usually don't read just fantastic fiction. I read a lot of styles, but lately I've found myself only wanting to pick up fantastic fiction.

I zoomed through Last Watch, the 4th book in the Day Watch/Night Watch/Twilight Watch series from Russia that finally made it to America (or to Barnes and Noble) 8 months late. It was fun--not as cataclysmic as the first three, and certainly not the last book in the series, despite the title, which is a relief.

I read The Haunted Hotel by Wilke Collins on my phone. It isn't really fantastic fiction, despite it's title, and it was something of a disappointment, being merely a melodrama with standard elements of the period, and none of the skill of The Moonstone or even The Woman in White.

Then I picked up Cities, an anthology of four stories that I had bought for my husband for Christmas, only to find out that he had already read all four stories in other collections. He and I have mixed feelings on anthologies--we never agree on the editors selections. They are by their very nature uneven.

This one was unusually in that the stories are by four of his favorite authors--two who are also favorites of mine. The theme too, cities, was a theme that I find fascinating.

The first story was by Paul Di Fillippo, A Year in the Linear City. I have mixed feelings on Di Fillippo. Sometimes he's brilliant, other times I think it's too much, like Terry Pratchet or Ben Elton. The ideas are always incredible though. This was no exception. The concept was a city made up of millions of city blocks in a long thin line, one block wide. streets on either side and cross streets every block. On one side are the tracks and beyond them, "The Wrong Side of the Tracks" where the Yardbulls live. On the other side is the river with barges and boats and beyond that the "Other Shore" where the Fishwives live. When one dies in this world one or the other, the angelic (but sea smelling) Fishwives or the demonic batwinged Yardbulls and no one knows which it will be. They take one--body and all--off to their realms. In the story a junky on a stained mattress is taken by the "angels" and a basketball player turned mayor is taken by the "demons" so who can say.

The city goes on forever--no one knows how far--dialects and customs change as if the distant boroughs were other countries. Subways exist in this world, but phones don't, and beneath it all are scales which, if pulled up will leave bloody wounds in the world behind.

Our protagonist is a writer of "Cosmogonic" fiction. And here is the really interesting part of the story--beyond the startling concept--it is an examination of writing, and particularly the writing of fantastic fiction! The protagonist is constantly imagining "What ifs." What if there were worlds on globes. What if there were machines that let you talk to distant places. What if there were no Fishwives and Yardbulls--what would the inhabitants of that world think of the afterlife. Take that to all who ask writers where they get their ideas. It is not the getting of ideas, but rather the developing of them--the ideas are all around ifone simply looks with a different eye. Like here, cosmogonic fiction is considered less important, but it makes the most money. "Quotidian" fiction is the respected genre (his word, not mine, which is part of my problem with the story.)

The second story is by China Mieville who seems to only write about cities--cities as great, dangerous living things. This time he is in London, not his alternate world, but a London where the beasts have escaped the mirrors and nearly destroyed the humans. And all that the last humans can do is surrender...that's where it ends.

The last story is by one of my favorites (as is Mieville), Geoff Ryman. I am bothered by its inclusion though because it is not a story about cities--unless it is merely the soullessness of life that we are racing towards. It's protagonist is my generation X, or perhaps the one after, Y, grown old and shut in Homes by our children and grand-children, but we are computer savvy. We can still hack and monitor and do all the online things we do--they monitor the keystrokes. And a band of old people with computer skills are hijacking the personal protection systems so they attack the people they're supposed to protect. Age Rage. And age know-how. Because the person behind it is lost in Alzheimers, only before it took him he programmed his systems to control him and take him out to do the jobs--to strike back. Woah!

But for a story on cities, it would have been better to use Ryman's own 253--the story of the 253 riders on a subway train that's about to crash--each story, one page each, 253 words long. Long before Twitter's limitation of 140 characters.

The fourth story is by Michael Moorcock, and I haven't read anything by him, and I couldn't read this--it was an alternate world, a post Bush world of consumerism as religion. Patriotism as a product to be purchased. That's about as far as I got. It seemed like an interesting concept but I just could seem to follow.

Watchmen continued

2009-03-01T00:28:00.002-05:00

When I titled that last post Watchmen started it, I was referring to a small streak in my life of reading fantastic fiction as well as starting the whole graphic novel thing (a listing of how the issues were stopped at one publisher and then continued at another is too long to go into and I'm not enough of a fangirl to tell it). One thing that did strike me on re-reading Watchmen (I first read it when I met my husband some 20 years ago--sweet singing Jesus I feel old) was the remarkable panel to panel work. Some people say that they can't read comics--they just can't adjust to the style of storytelling in the same way that some people say that can't watch sub-titled films. I will admit to having sometimes had difficulty with certain artists--Bill Sienkiewicz comes to mind. Other comic artists are extraordinary (so is Sienkiewicz, just sometimes distracting from the text) with work that could hang in museums--Jon Muth, John Bolton and the brilliant Alex Ross (who did the Obama as Superman shirt). As you can see, I'm more of a hyper-realist fan.

But to really be a comic fan, one should really be able to appreciate the way story telling in a comic is not just a story with pictures, but an integral part of the story--like the frames of a film.

The artist for Watchmen, Dave Gibbons, has given his stamp of approval to the film which is high praise, I think.

Alan Moore will never approve anything for a variety of reasons. I'm not going to touch that here.

Watchmen starts it all

2009-03-01T00:08:00.002-05:00

Unless you've been living under a rock, or Tivo/DVR all of your viewing, you are probably aware that there is a Superhero movie coming out next week called Watchmen and you may even be aware that all the fan boys (and even some fan girls) worship this Graphic Novel (originally issues) as nearly the sui generis of graphic novels, written by the truly eccentric and prickly (literally and figuratively) Alan Moore of V for Vendetta, From Hell, and others.

I remember talking to a co-worker about V for Vendetta and saying that while my husband and I liked the movie and didn't mind the changes, the graphic novel was darker, and the friend gaping at me as if I had spoken in Aramaic--how could it be darker.

The fear is, of course, that Watchmen will not be dark enough, and my own personal fear that if it is dark enough, it will not be what most of the audience is expecting. As in this early review (it's out in Britain):
http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20090227/en_nm/us_film_watchmen_1
He seems angry that they aren't really "Super" for super heroes. Well, neither are Batman and Iron Man if you mean super powers and not just really good toys, lots of money and brains. What the 80's brought in comics was a realization that it was much more interesting to study the superheroes rather than just their crimes. In a way this reflected the general trend in "escapist" entertainment. Hill Street Blues was much more about the tensions in the police HQ than the crimes, and the particular tensions of being a cop were what made the show great.

Likewise, the study of the particular tensions of costumed super heroeness has become rich ground. Even Superman gets angst these days.

This reviewer seems to get it (warning--major spoilers):
http://news.yahoo.com/s/newsarama/20090226/en_newsarama/moviereviewwatchmenworththewait

What happens when you are not needed? What happens when you become a God? Are costumed heroes really just sadistic vigilantes? Are they any better than mercenaries?

Moore's deep cynicism is part and parcel of Watchmen, and I'm not sure that an audience that likes it's comic book adaptions to have a romance a la Peter Parker and MJ, and a happy ending is ready for him. Certainly V for Vendetta suffered from that, but had Natalie Portman's star power. Watchmen, with the exception of Billy Crudup (who spends much of the movie as voice talent to a CGI version) this seems populated with B-listers.

Likewise, dark as Nolan's Batman films have been, the love story and to a certain extent the surrogate fathers of Alfred and Morgan Freeman's Lucius Fox give a sweet anchor to the fact that Bats and the Joker are much more alike than unalike. Here the villains are awfully close to the heroes or vice-a-versa--and that is much more like real life.

Imaginary Band

2009-02-26T11:53:00.003-05:00

I loved this so much in Facebook that I had to bring it over here.

And these really were exactly following the directions--I did crop and rotate the picture. Also, tip--have the sense to download the actual picture and not the thumbnail. Will definitely make your picture better, LOL.

I wonder what kind of sound they have? I'm thinking either intelligent thrash metal or Slavik angst.

CREATE YOUR BAND NAME & ALBUM COVER:To Do This:1 - Go to Wikipedia. Hit “random”or click http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:RandomThe first random Wikipedia article you get is the name of your band.

2 - Go to Quotations Page and select "random quotations"or click http://www.quotationspage.com/random.php3The last four or five words of the very last quote on the page is the title of your first album.

3 - Go to Flickr and click on “explore the last seven days”or click http://www.flickr.com/explore/interesting/7daysThird picture, no matter what it is, will be your album cover.

4 - Use Photoshop or similar to put it all together.

Top Albums

2009-02-22T22:27:00.004-05:00

I got tagged for this on Facebook and I didn't know how to respond. It's supposed to be the albums that mean the most to you, but many people are listing albums which are considered great albums. And I like great albums--I'm not one of those singles only kind of people--but in terms of my top albums I came up at sort of a loss. I didn't spend my money on music in my teenage years and so the list is limited to my favorite artists. So I decided I needed to explain my choices.

1. The Wizard of Oz, original movie soundtrack. What can I say. This movie/album was the end all, be all for me, up to about 7. I had all the books, the play sets, the dolls, I even saw Margaret Hamilton in one of her last performances as the Witch. I wore down the grooves (isn't it nice that that is a thing of the past?).

2. At 8 it was replaced with Camelot (original Broadway recording). It was just the perfect show for me. I read The Once and Future King and The Mists of Avalon and any other Arthurian stuff I could access, good and bad. I still think Alan Jay Lerner was the best lyricist of all time. I read his autobiography, checked out again and again from the library (and still kick myself that I didn't pick it up years later in a bookstore in New York). I loved it's blend of dark and light. Also bubbling under were My Fair Lady and Oliver! which taught me cockney (or the movies version of it). Somewhere in there I also found Cabaret and learned that as well, and Kismet.

3. I didn't listen to rock and roll until I was 12 because my parents didn't listen to it. We listened to Big Bands and Standards and some opera and show tunes. And then at 12 I discovered Duran Duran. But here it gets fuzzy. The album out at that time would have been Duran Duran (original--reissue) with Is There Something I Should Know in constant rotation on both the radio and MTV (when I could view it at friend's houses) and boy, did I love that video, but I also loved Save a Prayer from Rio (although bizarrely missed hearing Rio, the song, for at least six months).

4. And at the same time that I saw Duran Duran's posters in record stores I saw David Bowie for Let's Dance, but I didn't get the cassette until a few years later when a friend gave me hers. And I distinctly remember another friend's older sister playing Young Americans, the 45 for us at some point. Mixed in to that I caught some run of old Bowie videos on Friday Night Videos or some other show. After seeing Ashes to Ashes and Boys Keep Swinging, I was hooked. So is it Let's Dance, Heroes, Scary Monsters, Station to Station? I love Hunky Dory now. But I never owned these albums (they belong to my husband).

5. This same friend's sister played us all of Hounds of Love by Kate Bush when she bought it and I was hooked. I saved up and bought cassettes of every one of Kate's albums to that point because Kate answered something in me. To paraphrase Emily Dickinson, I felt as if the top of my head would come off. I now know that HOL is actually Kate lite, so I would say that it's a tie with The Dreaming. Suspended in 'Gaffa's lines, "Am I doing right, can I have it all now" seem to sum me up so often.

6. Can you remember the first time you saw "Sweet Dreams"? Annie Lennox. I wanted her, or I wanted to be her. The voice, the beauty, the bravery. Saved up, bought Sweet Dreams. Played it over and over.

7. Then too, Savage got me through some high school times--Annie's pain, my pain, Annie's experience, my desire for life.

8. I've mentioned in other posts how Don't You Want Me? by The Human League was one of the first New Wave songs I ever heard and probably one of the first rock and roll songs, but it would be more than 10 years before I heard Dare, the album all the way through. There were numerous bands that I heard then, who's CD's I now own (or downloads), but I couldn't buy them then. I did own Pretty in Pink (soundtrack). It seemed to validate the music that I was listening to.

9. And it got me into the Psychedelic Furs. I found Mirror Moves in a discount bin in a convenience store in Muncie, IN. Years later Should God Forget, the Psychedelic Furs retrospective (double album) would help get me through the worst time in my life.

10. Music for the Masses (Depeche Mode) and 11. Strip-Mine (James). This was the soundtrack to my high school romance. I only got the actual CD's for both of them. I tapped them off of my high school boyfriend and when I went away I stopped listening to them. I missed Strip-Mine the most.

12. Big Thing (Duran Duran). Seven and the Ragged Tiger was not that good--too overproduced and then there was the hiatus and Notorious, while interesting and gritty is still too much Nile Rogers. I think it's on Big Thing that they really matured as a band (by which point no one cared). I listened to Big Thing over and over during Christmas break of my senior year, writing college essays (which were all due on Dec. 31) and an essay for a competition on Atlas Shrugged. Even now, passages of the album will make me think of passages in the book.

13. A Little Night Music (original Broadway album). I don't know why, this one of all Sondheim, maybe the connection to the Bergman film. Maybe just a memory.

14. Gone to Earth (David Sylvian). I remember seeing David's picture in Star Hits at some point, and while I didn't develop a crush on him I thought him so beautiful--almost too beautiful. I know I heard about Gone to Earth at some point, borrowed it from a friend in college, and then played my then boyfriend/now husband's copy over and over. What I've needed from David's lyrics have changed over the years but there's always something there.

15. And the list wouldn't be complete without L'Arc~en~Ciel, my mid-life crisis crush. But the crush is over and the music remains. When I first heard L'Arc, I felt as I did when I first heard Duran or Bowie. That this was necessary. But because I was downloading, and downloading in the twilight of their career, I got a few random songs, and a few more and then whole albums and pretty much the whole discography together. Tierra and Awake remain my favorite albums. And Hyde's own Roentgen deserves a mention, but I cannot say which of those is the most valued.

And just to round it out, another list for which I have not been tagged, but began thinking about anyway:

Songs I could not do without:

1. Forbidden Colours, instrumental--Sakamoto)
2. Forbidden Colours, vocal--Sylvian)
3. Kasou-L'Arc
4. Grey Lady of the Sea--Duran Duran
5. Gymnopedies--Erik Satie
6. Claire de Lune--Debussy
7. Suo Gan--Empire of the Sun soundtrack
8. Suspended in Gaffa--Kate Bush
9. I Love You Goodbye--Thomas Dolby
10. A Drop of Colour--Hyde

I have not been the kind of person who makes mixes--I stress too much about the order, but with my lovely random feature on my mp3 I can pick the songs and let the player order them differently each time. I recently made a big list of "Happiness Songs"--those which make me smile when they begin, even though they may not actually be happy songs (I must be the only person in the world who smiles when they hear Disappointed by PIL or How Soon is Now sung by Richard Butler (Morrissey cover). I then made another list called "Sweeter than Happy" because these songs make me a little sad, but happy in my sadness. All of the above are on there.

1st Crown

2009-02-17T17:26:00.002-05:00

So I finally got the crown on Friday--quick and painless. Seems to fit well--so well that the dentist had trouble removing it after testing it to put on the cement.

Even with the length of the process (pretty much a month) I still prefer it to a breast exam. I'm not kidding.

The tooth is smoother and rounder than my other teeth and I find myself worrying it with my tongue--though not as much as I did the temporary which felt like a lump of cold hot glue gun glue and tasted a bit like my fake vampire fangs. It also seems strangely the wrong temperature, but I can't quite decide if it is colder or warmer. It feels like a slightly misshapen marble in my mouth.

I am sad that my old tooth had to be filed down--like I've lost something important--no going back now. As though I have taken my first steps toward becoming a Cyborg.

Speaking of why I need to change jobs

2009-02-15T13:59:00.003-05:00

On Wednesday my boss put me in a terrible position with our PR firm. I won't go into the details, but I had to rant for nearly an hour before I could call him back. And he, of course, felt that everything was fine. We are all miserable, and stressed and he thinks that's our problem not his.

That night I had a dream that wandered a bit, but eventually I ended up in a room in a museum filled with cases of live snakes, tarantulas, scorpions, beetles, etc. Creepy, crawly, you name it. And I knew in the dream that a friend was in the next room working on this exhibit. I was extremely freaked out, even though I don't have pronounced phobias about any of these things, just normal unease. The floor was sand and I found myself scooting, crawling out of the room, calling to my friend that I couldn't stay in there. There was a sudden sharp pain in my hand and I looked down to see a beetle biting me--a beetle about as large as my hand with half inch pincers. It was very painful and I screamed "Help me," and woke up as I was screaming. I was so skittish that the sight of my husbands sleep mask with it's elastic straps made me shudder.

Rolling over and picking up my fabulous phone I looked up beetles in dreams:

To see a beetle in your dream, indicates that some destructive influences
may be at work in your waking life. You may also feel that your values and
beliefs are being compromised.

And this:

The snake may also refer to a person around you who is callous, ruthless, and
can't be trusted.

I need to get out of my job.

A couple of weeks ago I dreamt that I was lost in familiar surroundings and I lost a whole day trying to get to where I was going, missing work. The dream was so vivid that I was relieved when I finally woke to realize that that was not my life. And I can usually practice lucid dreaming and take myself out of things.

Pre-decisions to be made

2009-02-15T13:46:00.002-05:00

I went on a job interview on Friday. This should be a good thing as I must, must, must get away from my current job, but it's not the ideal job for me.

Basically I would be a wholesaler for a home health aide company. I would dine and schmooze people who could/would refer patients to this home company. But here's the thing. I hate schmoozing. I hate making phone calls. I barely call my friends. I can be that person--act like that person--that extroverted person, but it's only an act, and I find it tiring--Novel as people person. I do it for interviews, auditions, etc. I think I do it pretty well, but it's not who I am. The friend who recommended me thought that I was a people person.

But, the boss was sane and pleasant and quiet and calm, and committed to working together and helping grow the business, and focused and intelligent. I'd be working with an old friend (who called me in for it) and I wouldn't even have to work in the office as long as the numbers were there--the incoming calls. Beat my goal and I'd get a bonus. The friend and I worked for a boss like the one I have now, and she assures me that six months into this job this boss is exactly as calm and pleasant as he seems.

All of this is pre-decision. He's going to come back with what he could pay and then I'll have a second interview where I'll play that person--the one who can schmooze and soft sell with the best of 'em. It might not be enough money to make it worthwhile. He might not like my technique--I might not be able to fake it as well as he wants. So it could all be moot.

I remember speaking with a woman who was a coach for a company and we discussed being introverted/extroverted. She said that before she took that job she was an introvert on Myers-Briggs (or one of the personality tests) and after having the job for a while the numbers changed and she was more extroverted. Perhaps it would force me to become that more extroverted person, take me out of myself. Fake it until it become real. And I would have a script. The boss would work with me and we would make it work...

Again--this is a pre-thought. I have three friends who might be good for this job, but none of them live in Boston, and two of them do not like to drive in Boston (well, who does) and this job would require it. I wouldn't enjoy that piece much either, but it wouldn't often be at rush hour. I'd get to dine well. I'd be reimbursed.

I'll keep you posted.

Invisible Monsters (actually about my phone)

2009-02-11T19:36:00.003-05:00

I just read "Invisible Monsters" by Chuck Palahniuk, author of Fight Club. It wasn't that good--the central premise seemed ripped from "Infinite Jest" by the late, lamented David Foster Wallace, the beauty disfigured. Even the drag queens and the parents who had more pride in being parents of a dead gay son than they ever had for the son, seemed to just be one of the threads in IJ. We've been here, done this. And the split identity of narrator/narrated was done much better in Fight Club.

The only reason I'm really writing about this is because it is the first book that I read on my phone. Yes, on my phone. Essentially one paragraph at a time, but it's a fairly short book. I'm currently reading Japanese Fairy Tales. These are great because I can read a few at a time.

My phone, the G1, is like the iPhone and has many of the same apps that you see on the commercials. One of the best is Shazam which allows you to hold your phone up to "hear" a song in public or on the radio--it listens and then analyzes--about 20 seconds and then it identifies the song, artist and album and links you to YouTube or Amazon or the artist's My Space page. I am boggled by the algorithms that this must take--because it's almost never stumped. It can't do classical (which would be difficult as there are so many recordings of the same pieces) and it doesn't do well with old standards, but it DID identify Nat King Cole and Bing Crosby singing Christmas songs (I was testing it's limits).

And then it has absurd apps. like the light sabre (with sound when you swing the phone), a steamy window you can write on and a Tricorder (Next Gen).

PLUS--better than the iPhone it has a hard keyboard so you don't have to deal with the tiny touch buttons. I can update Facebook, Twitter and my blog from the phone, plus surf the web and check my email.

In a very short time, our phone will become our only device. All it needs is a projection screen and projection keyboard, or perhaps just the movie eye-set or the predicted tv contacts.

The future is here.

25 Things + 5

2009-02-11T19:28:00.003-05:00

In case you are not on Facebook and have not otherwise heard, 25 Things is the newest, greatest sociological thing, ever. So I'm reprinting mine here, but I realized that I had two #19's (there is no number 6) so I decided to go on to 30.

1. I own and wear some clothes that I've had since I was 13 including shoes and jewelry.
2. I gain weight first in my hips and thighs and lose it first in my shoulders and chest--always have.
3. I have trouble wearing fitted clothes for any length of time including hose--always have--it makes me feel claustrophobic so I've always favored baggy clothing (this may have contributed to number 1).
4. I have been known to eat and enjoy raw oatmeal including the instant kind in the little envelopes, uncooked batter of almost any kind (pancakes, bread), powdered drink mix as candy, orange peels and lemon wedges with sugar (peel and all). I have even eaten raw spaghetti, but I can't recommend it.
5. I've only begun to enjoy mustard as a flavoring in the last few years.
6. I still can't stand any kind of tomatoes or melons although I like most other fruits and vegetables, except squash and okra.
7. I have only really dated two men in my life and I married the second.
8. I had no intention of marrying the first man I fell in love with in college, but sometimes life trumps common wisdom.
9. I am allergic to wool and find acrylic and polyester uncomfortable, although I don't mind the new micro-fibers. If I could, I would spend the rest of my life in silk, rayon and cotton.
10. I still wonder sometimes what would have happened if I'd taken the scholarship and gone to Scripps in CA. I would have married someone else (or not married) and everything would be different.
11. I also wonder if we should have had a child--that it would have forced us to grow up--and then I hear some three year old screaming just because they can and think--nope.
12. The death of my first dog in 1998 was one of the top five most devastating things to ever happen to me. I can't imagine losing a child, also part of #11.
13. I still miss talking to my Dad who died in 1997 (that would also be in the top five).
14. I have difficulty parting with inanimate objects that I've loved and which have gotten me through rough times--I tend to apologize to them and try to find them new homes or new uses. But I am not one of those people who name inanimate objects like cars. I apologized to my old Golf when I traded it in. I think this is part of why I'm glad I've only dated two people and had two cars.
15. I read voraciously and eclectically, but I am quite dismissive of poor writing. I have no hesitation in skipping to the end of books if the writing is crap (I'm talking to you Dan Brown) or tossing them aside, but I will pick up almost any book that sounds interesting from a free table. Then I try to pass them along.
16. I think that speculative fiction is the most important genre as it tells us about where we have been, where we are AND where we are going--unfortunately there are even more crap writers in this genre than any other, except maybe mystery.
17. I am completely addicted to my G1 phone--I use it as an alarm clock, play with it before I get out of bed and check for new apps. at least twice a day. Sometimes I just like to hold it.
18. Sometimes I think of all the things that I'd like to do and could do when I wake up and end up not managing to choose anything to begin.
19. When I do start working I am extremely efficient.
20. I enjoy playing with programs instead of taking lessons--but then become frustrated that there's so much that I don't know. I also like taking things apart but only if I'm certain I can get them back together again.
21. Because my husband and I are fairly non-sentimental, I like to make up absurd terms of endearment for him like Puck-Wudgie. It used to annoy him, but I think he likes it now.
22. We both make up absurd names for our pets and change the lyrics of songs to fit them.
23. I think con-artist is the only crime that should absolutely get the death penalty.
24. I instantly distrust arrogant people and narcissists. I think it is a front for insecurity. (Says the woman typing 25 things about herself.) This is somewhat difficult in theater and may be why I'm not doing much of it.
25. I believe more in nurture than nature--say 90/10 or maybe 85/15.
26. I am in favor of less friends, but better relationships.
27. I'm not much of a drinker. I like drinks that taste like desserts primarily, and even then 1 will pretty much do me.
28. I've begun to drink more in this job--which means one drink two or three times a week as opposed to one drink a month.
29. My irises have been getting steadily lighter in color since my mid-20's.
30. I stalked my husband for a month before I got up the nerve to talk to him.

Wednesday Nights--Television

2009-02-11T19:16:00.003-05:00

Last week I noticed that tonight's television line up is:

Life, Lost, Lie to Me, Life on Mars and Law and Order

Brought to you by the letter L (or Quaker) evidently.

Then I went into my DVR over the weekend and noticed that I had two shows back to back:

Trust Me
Lie to Me

HA HA

But seriously, I need to cut out some shows. If I didn't have DVR it wouldn't be so bad--I'd have to choose one to watch and that would be it, but now I can watch double the shows! I've lost Eli Stone and Crusoe, of course, but this is what I'm watching (parenthesis for what I'm taping):
Monday-House, 24, Medium (Trust Me)
Tuesday-Fringe, Law & Order: SVU
Wednesday-Life, L&O (Lost, Lie to Me, Life on Mars)
Thursday-Bones, CSI, 11th Hour

And now on Friday we have Dollhouse coming up. My husband is actually being very frugal--House, Medium, L&O:SVU, L&O, Life, Bones, CSI with occasional foray's into Lie to Me, Life on Mars and 11th Hour. Oh, and ER's pulling out the stops for the last season, so we're kind of watching that.

And to tell the truth, we haven't really fallen for Trust Me or Lie to Me yet. We're mainly watching for the cast and that may not be enough.

I'll report back.

Fun web things

2009-02-08T18:00:00.001-05:00

Found this great site that lets you make simple tiles for backgrounds--as you can see, I've added it here. I'm thinking I need to jazz up my site.

http://bgpatterns.com/

Fun thing a friend sent me

2009-02-08T17:16:00.001-05:00

http://www.guzer.com/videos/needle-art.php

Of Pine Needles and other infinite things

2009-01-27T10:44:00.005-05:00

So I cleaned this weekend--really, really cleaned instead of just straightening and part of cleaning required vacuuming and dustbusting pine needles as well as dust bunnies. Now, the dust bunnies are self-replicating, of course, and will come back, but as far as I know, pine needles are not and yet, no matter how carefully I clean at some point in say, July, I shall pull out a book that was nowhere near the Christmas Tree and scatter a few sad pine needles on the floor.

While decorating for Christmas a sad piece of tinsel ended up on the floor.

We've never put tinsel on our tree.

So, despite having moved my husband's families ornaments into different boxes over the years, this remnant of his childhood had clung on waiting to fall in this apartment.

On our second Christmas together I gave my husband tree shaped confetti in his card. Periodically a tiny tree will appear in the bottom of a drawer. 18 years old and opened in another person's house, with two moves in between.

You Know What I Hate?

2009-01-27T10:35:00.002-05:00

Mr. Smith: I move my finger one inch to use my turn signal. Why are these a$$holes so lazy they can't move their finger one f#@!ing measly inch to drive more safely? You wanna know why? DQ: Not particularly. Mr. Smith: Because these rich bastards have to be callous and inconsiderate in the first place to make all that money, so when they get on the road, they can't help themselves. They've gotta be callous and inconsiderate drivers too. It's in their nature.
--Shoot 'Em Up

Why, oh, why does no one use their turn signal? It helps them as much as us--lets us know what you are doing so we can accommodate it. Of course, it is seen as a sign of weakness in Boston--and people will take advantage of the fact that you are signalling your intentions to thwart you.

On God Bless America

2009-01-22T10:18:00.003-05:00

On reflection I DO understand God Bless America. God Bless the concepts and principles of this nation. But God Bless all people everywhere.

Why I Voted for Barack Obama

2009-01-19T18:28:00.001-05:00

This essay was originally going to be called “Why I’m Voting for Barack Obama” and I was going to post it a few days before the election. But then I got superstitious and decided not to jinx him and I wanted to finish reading Dreams From My Father—which I did, on election eve.

And then, once he’d won, I wanted to read The Audacity of Hope before I finished it, and so things I wanted to say played in and out of my mind for the next two months. Hopefully I’ll get to the point I’m trying to make before he takes office tomorrow. This is what I wrote a few months ago. I thought I would change it, but I still like it even if I’ve added more:

Do I think he’s the absolute best candidate for president ever? No.
I’m not sure what that person would look like.
But I think he is certainly the best running now.

A friend asked me recently if I liked him. Yes, I like him. I like him more and more as we approach the election. I like his calm, his grasp of rhetoric, his intelligence after eight years of a man who seemed at times barely functionally literate. I like his smile and his graciousness. And, as a multi-racial, Ivy-League educated, naturalized American, I like his back story because it relates to me. And that is the point, I think, that we do vote for whom we relate to, to a large extent. It is not a valid reason for Hockey Moms to vote for Palin even though they may be pro-choice themselves, or anti-gun, and it’s not enough of a reason for me to vote for him either. But there is a great deal more to my decision and it does start here, in my understanding of where he is coming from, because I have often faced the same questions.

I am reading his book, Dreams From My Father. I started it because I was tired of hearing the mis-quotes in the right-wing press and I wanted to form my own decisions. Would I give equal time and consideration to McCain’s book, Faith of My Fathers? Absolutely, but I started with Obama because I haven’t heard the McCain book misquoted.

Dreams From My Father is beautifully written, written in Senator Obama’s own voice as absolutely as if you were hearing him speak. It bogs down a bit—he has not crafted the narrative to make it more dramatic. It is himself coming to terms with the issues I mentioned above—of being multi-racial, of being intelligent but of making the choice to give something back and become involved because racism is not dead in this country and anyone who says or thinks that it is is lying to us or to themselves. It is himself coming to terms with what it means to be human with all our foibles and issues and baggage, seen through his own particular lens, and the lens of the mythical man who was his father.

In 2000 I admired John McCain. I certainly admired him more than Bush. I ignored his temper and the Keating Five scandal and saw a good man who’d made some mistakes. I saw a man who reminded me in some ways of my father and for whom I think my father would have voted. I also saw a man who I believed might be able to bridge the middle. I believe that in the intervening 8 years he has made every effort to court the neo-con, right-wing base in order to win this election. In 2000 he denounced the hate mongering of the evangelicals, while in this campaign he has accepted the endorsements and/or shared stages with the likes of Falwell and Hagee. I still believe that he is in some ways a good man who believes that the ends—his presidency—is worth any means, but I think if he were elected, he would find that it is not possible to lease your soul out and then expect to get it back, no strings attached. I have referenced this to many people, that Lyndon Johnson wanted to do so much good but made so many deals along the way that he found himself hog-tied in office—owing allegiance to those who got him there. I think that McCain would find himself in the same position. I am not the first to say that the John McCain of 2000 would not vote for the John McCain of 2008.

To a certain extent I, like so many other people, am voting not for a candidate, but against a continuation of the last eight years. I am sick to death of politics in America, of the Rovian/Cheneyesque style of attack your enemy with hot button words and evade punishment of your own treachery and corruption. Of this bullying, McCarthyesque labeling—if you can brand your enemy with being un-American then you can sway the public even if you can never actually define what that means. Of feeding an “Us vs. Them” mentality that reduces your enemy to less than human instead of accepting differences of opinion.

Like Michelle Obama I have not been proud of America these last eight years, and perhaps not ever. I am ashamed of Guantanamo and the Patriot Act. I am horrified that incompetence and outright treachery is ignored. That no one was punished for outing a CIA operative—a truly, legally treasonous action, as opposed to the so-called treasonous action of standing up and saying, “I believe the policies being pursued by this administration are wrong.” The first is in the law books. The second is the most Patriotic thing one can do, because the government is of the people and by the people and the majority of Americans think this administration is corrupt. I am angry that Alberto Gonzales and other Bush cronies will not be punished for at best monumental incompetence, at worst, outright lying and cover-up.

The further collapse of John McCain in my eyes is his acceptance and use of tactics which were used against him in 2000 and which he decried then, but because they work, has begun to use now. The cheap smears, the blaming of the press, the Swift-boat attacks… Don’t even get me started on Sarah Palin. She is not running for president, and so should not be the focus, but she and McCain have made her the focus and she exemplifies to me everything that is wrong with the Conservative party today. She came out of the gate attacking not leading. All that she has done has been to attack Senator Obama with meaningless smears, dancing away from details and facts before she is called upon to prove them. It was the basis of her acceptance speech and it has been her raison d’etre ever since. Her excuse for her absolutely mortifying performance with Katie Couric? “Well, she wouldn’t let me talk about what I wanted to talk about. I wanted to talk about Senator Obama.” I’m sorry, Governor Palin, you serve at our discretion, and we want to know what your policies have been, what you have done and will do, not what you think of Senator Obama. You are not there to repeat gossip and innuendo; you are there to prove that you have the intelligence and the temperament to lead.

One of the things that I do not understand in America is this reverence of the stupid. That somehow being educated and intelligent (though the two do not always go hand in hand) is seen as somehow suspect. That by merely not dumming oneself down, one is seen as presenting oneself as superior. Do you know why we have an electoral college, when we are the only nation that still does so? It was because those revered Founding Fathers, the most educated men of their time, in a time when most of the population could not read or write, believed that the general public was too stupid to be trusted with the vote.

I personally would like to believe that the people governing the country are the smartest and the most educated. That they are not people I would drink beer with because I would not be smart enough to join in their conversation. I believe that the more intelligent you are, the more likely you are to see the world in shades of grey. The world is not this simple black and white. I will take an intelligent man who is able to change his mind honestly and weigh different points over a rigid “decider” any day. To me, Palin suffers from the same hubris as Bush, Cheney and their crew. Because she believes her cause to be just, she can break any law. After all, she’s doing it for our own good. Dictators think this way. The tales of corruption and rule bending in her Alaskan dealings are the tip of the iceberg in terms of the power she thinks she deserves. She scares me because she thinks she knows what is right. Wisdom is knowing what you do not know. We have suffered through eight years of a man who either took no counsel but his own, or only took counsel that agreed with what he had already decided. We need a leader who will take counsel from those who disagree with him. Lincoln knew that. Jefferson and Adams knew that.

But again, to vote against something is not the reason to vote for a candidate. The Germans voted for someone who promised something different in the 1930’s. The French Revolution gave way to the Reign of Terror.

So, I am voting for Senator Obama because I agree with him. Because the things about him that scare so many people in America are things that I embrace when they are true and ignore when they are false.

Something I do to try and stay balanced is listen to as much of the right wing attack mongering as I can stand. If there is something that I haven’t heard from the left I research it. There is a particularly odious radio personality here in the Bill O’Reilly, Rush Limbaugh school who likes to say that the left says that anyone who uses Obama’s middle name is a racist. Well, no. It is the fact that the right glories in saying his middle name for its fear value. Do we equally hear John McCain’s middle name? Sarah Palin’s? The S. in Harry S. Truman didn’t stand for anything. When has a candidate’s middle name every mattered until now?

And, (and this is a big one) what if he WERE Muslim? The rise of the neo-conservative, Evangelical movement in America has kept the presidency the right of white, Christian men. Since no one can come right out and say, “We can’t elect him because he’s black,” they will instead say, “We can’t elect him because he’s Muslim.” Would we be equally afraid if his name were Benjamin Ben Gurion? We have not had a Jewish President either. Or as I recently joked with friends if his name were Brock O’Bama. Would the American public then believe that he must be tied to the IRA? The Founding Fathers, the ones that the right likes to reference, believed in separation of church and state. That were not Evangelicals. They came from different denominations and different faiths. They were men of the age of Reason. Their God was the Great Watch Maker who did not send Katrina to kill homosexuals.

These words still stand. A few weeks before the election, I was speaking with two different friends, long-time liberals, and they were still voting against Bush and not for Obama. They had been Hillary supporters. They said that they still didn’t know what he stood for. That surprised me as I read Audacity of Hope, because it is all right there. He sees that there are a multitude of answers for every problem and that we respond to problems both emotionally and rationally, and sometimes we have to wait for the emotion to pass before we can make a rational and long lasting decision. That each answer has pros and cons and that each person who disagrees with you has reasons, some logical and some emotional, for believing as they do. That you must learn what motivates people before you can work with them and you CAN work with them if you will take the time and not dismiss them as “crazies” whom we must work against. And I will be the first to admit that these tactics are not the purview of the right, but I do not believe they are the tactics of Barack Obama

I like him. I really like him. I like him more with every appointment he makes, with every unflappable appearance. I’ve never supported a candidate the way I’ve supported him—with donations and purchases. I’ve never put a candidate’s magnet on my car until now. I proudly wore the button. His way of thinking is my way of thinking and that is at the heart what it is about. Will I agree with him on every decision? Absolutely not. Do I believe that I will understand why he is doing what he is doing? Yes, and that is something that has been sorely lacking in government for sometime.

I have been asked if I think he can do everything he says that he is going to do—well, no. There are things any presidential candidate does not know on the campaign trail that he is told when he is elected and only a fool would think that a decision can be made without all of the facts in evidence. President Obama knows that and has said that and I don’t think it’s waffling or giving himself an out to acknowledge that he doesn’t know everything. Instead it makes him human and wise—more wise I think that those who ignore facts for their own pre-agenda. Will he do it all? We can hope and pray, but even if he fails in some things, a man’s reach should always exceed his grasp.

Perhaps it is fitting that I am wrapping this up on Martin Luther King Day. I remember when the holiday was being debated and my parents were against it. Looking up the public timeline and my own personally timeline I must have been 10 or 11. I don’t think they had any racist reasons, simply the feeling that not enough time had passed. I disagreed and I remember getting on a chair and reciting the “I Have a Dream” speech.

Hindsight makes us all geniuses but I believe that I knew, even then, that the white world that my parents lived in was different than the world that my minority friends lived in, and that I, as a “Mutt” to use the new president’s term, existed in a strange limbo in between. This is why I have looked at the actual transcripts of Reverend Wright and seen a patriotic man who wants to point out in strong terms that America is not perfect and ignoring the problems do not make them go away.

As I grew older and I lived through poverty and failed to “pull myself out of” depressions and to succeed in the Ayn Randian ideal of the far right, I realized that life is not so simple as the platitudes of gung-ho individualism. Perhaps they never were, but certainly not in a world where the wealthiest one per cent of households control a third of the national wealth. When I was born it was still possible to buy a house on one average income—now it is virtually impossible.

I have come to believe that investment in health care and education IS investment in American infrastructure and not theft from the rich as it is portrayed. The specter of socialism was used throughout this election as if we were still fighting the Cold War. The fact that Russia was not at the height of the Cold War, practicing socialism or communism as it was written is always ignored. It is time for the United States to understand that it is part of the global economy whether it likes it or not—we cannot go back or ignore the world outside our borders. International business and the Internet have made that impossible. I do not view it as a bad thing but whether I do or not, it is not going to stop. Perhaps it is my international birth that has always made me question the intention of “God Bless America.” God bless us all. The accident of birth is not an assurance of anything. If life were fair then most immigrants are the truest Americans because they have gone through the most to earn it.

President Obama has existed in this same limbo as I have—never white but never black enough. He has been poor. He has been unhappy and he has made mistakes. He is also able to speak of those times in clear and sometimes beautiful language. In this I think he speaks for far more Americans than ever before. And that is why I voted for Barack Obama, the 44th President of the United States. God bless him and keep him safe. God bless us all.

Oh, damn it!

2009-01-16T13:49:00.002-05:00

Now Sir John Mortimer, creator of Rumpole of the Bailey and author of one of the best little books of essays I've ever read. I realize that all of these men were over 80 (Wyeth over 90), but really

And now for something completely different--and funny (if you like Japanese)

2009-01-16T10:35:00.003-05:00

So, I'm talking to my Japanese friend about Patrick McGoohan's death because her husband, like my husband, is a big Prisoner fan, and I mention that PM was in some of the Colombo films of the 70's and she says she loved those. So, I'm trying to imagine Peter Falk speaking in Japanese. And we talk about more shows that crossed the ocean and she tells me that she saw Mr. Ed as a child--subbed in Japanese.

And I say: Ed-u San?
And then I think about the show for a moment and say: Actually it should have been Ed-u Sensai or at least Ed-u Sempai.

Of all the shows to take over...I wonder how close the translations were--HA!

More sad...

2009-01-16T10:34:00.000-05:00

And now Andrew Wyeth, RIP.

Sad day

2009-01-14T21:22:00.001-05:00

We have lost both Patrick McGoohan and Ricardo Montalban. :(

Sports in our house

2009-01-11T20:24:00.002-05:00

It's time for the annual battle between the dust bunnies and the pine needles. The pine needles have taken a substantial lead.

Crusoe and the A-B problem

2009-01-11T02:41:00.003-05:00

They've brought back Crusoe and stuck it on Saturday nights--a sure way to kill anything.

I like Crusoe, but it's always going to be limited by the A-B problem. Crusoe can never get off of the island, no matter what happens. Something must always thwart it at the last minute. Unfortunately that renders it a more literate Gilligan's Island.

What good are visions you cannot use?

2009-01-11T02:32:00.003-05:00

I often dream of fashions I cannot sew. Last night I dreamt of jewelry and art I cannot make. I lack even the ability to draw them as accurately as I would like so that someone else can make them. I can hear music in my head that I cannot transcribe.

Should I take classes to try and learn the skills I would need to bring these to reality? And what would I do with them then? What do I do with the things that I sew and create now?

I also dream of stories that I should write and that I can do, but then I grow afraid--thinking of what will I do with it when it's done, when I should just think of getting it down and seeing what it is.

Does this happen to other people?

Dentists and the service industry.

2009-01-11T02:06:00.002-05:00

So now I have to get a crown (which I didn't realize was almost always necessary after a root canal--especially in a molar) and I have to decide whether I should go to my regular dentist or to my new dentist. This is my post on trying to figure out the pros and cons of either and it brings up an interesting point that relates to my job.

Part of what my company does is coach financial planners on how to get and retain high net worth clients (or any clients, for that matter), and we've had some speakers talk about presentation of office etc.

My old dentist, let us call him A, has a beautiful private office in the first floor of what was once a house outside of Davis Square in Somerville. This used to be relatively easy to access from my old address, but is somewhat harder now (it is where I learned to ride a bike). The waiting room has a TV, and a large array of magazines and some lovely art (because the dentist owns a share in an art gallery on Newbury St.). There are several hygienists and the rooms are relatively private. There's mouthwash and toothpaste available in the bathroom. There's always unobtrusive rock and roll playing. There are plants.

I generally see the hygienist and only see the dentist for cavities. He's nice and thorough, and the practice uses the most modern equipment including showing you a slide of the lovely bacteria in your mouth on a big screen. It also, IMO oversells. They like you to come in every three months. They've scaled both my teeth and my husbands, convinced us to buy a water pick and seem to end each session with some new product you should really try--special toothpaste, mouthwash, etc. Most I resist and if I do buy, I don't buy it from them but find a lower price elsewhere. I'm sure it's how he is able to have such a lovely office. Parking is on the street, but I've never really had a problem.

Dentist B, on the other hand is in Malden and were the weather permitting, I could easily walk there. There is a parking lot, but it's kind of tricky to get to. She's in an old office building. The office is spare and she has only one hygienist and privacy is a little less. She's Chinese, and didn't always understand me during small talk but always understood when I said I was still feeling pain or had other concerns. I don't think she was using the most modern techniques (but I don't' know since this was my first root canal), and even though she prescribed pain killers for me she spoke of her own belief in only holistic and homeopathic medicine.

Here's the thing. I don't think I really like Dentist A and I liked Dentist B, for all of the limitations. She seemed more concerned, even though Dentist A called me several times (I had left messages telling him of my problem) assuring me that he would fit me in to relieve the pain even though he was fully booked. He worked very hard to get my bite right from the filling--but this was the first time that I had ever had a problem with a bite and I don't know if that was him speeding through the filling or just a fluke and didn't charge me to redo his own work, but somehow she just seemed more gentle and more responsive. On the negative, both seem to have slightly ditzy assistants. Dentist B also seems a little disorganized, scrambling to get everything together, while Dentist A clearly has a system, with everything in it's place. Not something you want to worry about as you lay there with your mouth painfully open, and strange machines buzzing.

So I'm probably leaning towards switching dentists. So what do we make of the better office theory of our speakers. In the end, it's about concern and listening and not the showy office or expensive decorations. I'm not sure if most financial planners get that.

Unusual Teeth

2009-01-11T01:44:00.004-05:00

Wouldn't that be a great name for a band?

So, I had my first Root Canal on Friday afternoon. At first I wondered what all the fuss was about--nothing worse than a regular filling, but then as it went on and on, and with the ongoing tenderness in my jaw, I'm understanding (although it seems to be receding) why it has such a bad reputation. I wish I had looked up exactly what was involved before I did it, but perhaps it was better that I not know.

Strangely, I feel a certain shame that I needed a root canal at my age. As if I do not take good care of my teeth. As one might feel shame that one had lice or bed bugs. I had gotten a filling in late summer and afterwards experienced much tenderness which I attributed to a bad bite form and the dentist kept filing away but finally around Thanksgiving I was having pain and he removed the first filling, added different seal that was supposed to relieve sensitivity but warned me that if I had pain again I would need a root canal. So I had a few twinges, but nothing more until New Years Day (of course--grrr...) .

The dentist that I ended up visiting because she could see me immediately was not my regular dentist. She relieved the pain and sent me home with antibiotics. She also told me it wasn't my fault! I have unusual teeth. I have four root canals in that molar instead of two or three and the pulp came up very high (and does in many of my teeth according to x-ray)--higher than usual so much closer to the filling. Whew.

Turns out my root canals were also very curved, also unusual--the procedure took almost 3 and a half hours. Blech. Strangely though, I almost prefer a root canal to a breast exam. It's a close race. On the one hand, the breast exam is very short, but I often do have bruising or tenderness the next day, and there is the whole fear factor too. Since I have no medical history except that I was born in a country where agent orange was prevalent and since I had a lump (benign) at 34 it's a great unknown. That I will have to go in and get my boobs squashed for the rest of my life is deeply upsetting to me.

I remember in my teens I had all four wisdom teeth out at once with only local because I didn't have dental care that provided for general (which I learned later is often used). Also, because my teeth were coming in sideways I couldn't just have them pulled. I had a friend who had hers intact in a small box. Mine had to be broken in my jaw and pulled out piece by piece. The ongoing joy of unusual teeth.

The ability of humans to inflict pain.

2009-01-11T01:14:00.003-05:00

Last week's Law and Order broke my heart. I couldn't stop crying. I put it in my Twitter feed. It was about adoptees which is a hard place for me to begin with and then--I had heard of people adopting children to get servants, but the self congratulation of these "parents" as though they were doing a "good" thing and the place where it led took me apart. Ruth Rendell wrote a novel about the problem in Britain called Simisola and that one shook me too. Rather like the Elizabeth George novel "What Came Before He Shot Her." All we get is the result--child becomes murderer. Not the terrible whys that could take a sweet child there.

How is it that we are so ready to inflict pain both mental and physical on other humans? That we spend so much time and energy planning it--we as a race--through out recorded time. We caught a show the other night on torture devices of the middle ages--and I thought, as I've often thought, who thought of those devices. Who sat around with the limited knowledge of the human body of the time and thought of ways to inflict the most pain without actually killing. Who thought of waterboarding--that ancient and so simple torture (and it is torture). It is bad enough of course that film makers must think of imaginary ways to kill--that the ante is always upped to create something never seen, but of course, they need not consider that the people would probably die of shock and blood loss long before the final frame of Saw or any other of the new and bloodier horror films. The torturers wanted long and slow pain before death--to bring you close to death but not quite.

On New Year's Day one of my teeth started aching. At first it was intermittent but by the night it was continuous. I ate a tube of Orajel and nothing helped. The pain would start with a slow burning sensation along the gum (possibly from overuse of Orajel) and progress rapidly to the sensation that a large house nail was being driven into my jaw. Oddly the only thing that relieved it (and thank God there was some form of relief) was to drink cold water--it gave blessed relief for about 5 minutes and then it would begin again. I spent the entire night drinking water and dozing between. On the hour I would go to the bathroom and refill my glass. By morning I had drunk an entire gallon of water. By 7:30 I was looking for dentists, any dentist who were open on Jan. 2nd and could see me immediately.

I remember thinking of those torture device--some of which were designed to drive the teeth together until the jaw was broken and I thought that if I was forced to endure that pain in all my teeth with no respite I would tell anything, sell anyone to make it stop.

Coen Brothers Films

2009-01-11T00:59:00.002-05:00

Had sort of a Coen Brothers fest lately--probably because the stations have been running so many of them because of the DVD release of Burn After Reading.

Just watched it. It was funny, but I have to agree with the critics that this was not their best. Some of the expressions from Clooney and Pitt are priceless--that play upon the meta-of Clooney and Pitt being somewhat unattractive, schlubs--and the final coming together of the stories delightful.

My favorites remain "O, Brother" and "Barton Fink." I have not seen "The Ladykillers" because the original is so priceless and perfect with Alec Guinness that I kind of think a remake is a travesty. I absolutely do not get "The Big Lebowski" and quite frankly, having recently seen "No Country," I didn't get that either. I did miss the first 15 minutes or so of that and so perhaps my perception is skewed. I thought it okay, but I found none of the special qualities that make a Coen Bros. film and couldn't quite understand all of the praise that was heaped upon it.

On the second tier would be Intolerable Cruelty (fluff but so funny--second in what Clooney calls their trilogy of Clooney as idiot characters), The Man Who Wasn't There--very subtle for them, Fargo--of course, doncha know, Blood Simple and Miller's Crossing.

I only saw Raising Arizona a couple of weeks ago (amazing but true) and I laughed quite a bit, but it seemed oddly forced after their recent stuff. I always forget that Hudsucker is theirs and I haven't seen the short pieces that they did recently.

Burn After Reading (2008)
Chacun son cinéma ou Ce petit coup au coeur quand la lumière s'éteint et que le film commence (2007) (segment "World Cinema") ... aka Chacun son cinéma (France: short title) ... aka To Each His Cinema (International: English title)
No Country for Old Men (2007)
Paris, je t'aime (2006) (segment "Tuileries") ... aka Paris, I Love You (Hong Kong: English title)
The Ladykillers (2004)
Intolerable Cruelty (2003)
The Man Who Wasn't There (2001)
O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000) ... aka O' Brother (France)
The Big Lebowski (1998)
Fargo (1996)
The Hudsucker Proxy (1994) ... aka Hudsucker - Der große Sprung (Germany)
Barton Fink (1991)
Miller's Crossing (1990)
Raising Arizona (1987)
Blood Simple. (1984)

Shoes at Bush Part II

2009-01-11T00:48:00.009-05:00

I have mailed my shoes to Bush--Priority so it will get there in time, although, whether they will ever reach the president or if he will even be notified of their arrival (and I am sure many others) is very much in doubt. I went with the Shakespeare.

And lest anyone think that I am completely un-American, I also mailed our two old cell phones (2 generations old) to Cell Phones for Soldiers.

Funniest thing ever

2009-01-05T16:52:00.001-05:00

Well, probably not, but still pretty funny. Funnier if you are familiar with Facebook AND Austen, but still pretty great even if you aren't.

http://www.much-ado.net/austenbook/

Adapting a book--The Prestige

2009-01-04T15:47:00.003-05:00

I was completely blown away by the movie of The Prestige, and I thought then about reading the novel, but it seemed too soon. So I carried the author's name around with me for over a year (Christopher Priest) and then, finally remembered to buy it through an odd sequence of events. We watched The Painted Veil based on the novel by Maugham starring Edward Norton, and while I decided I didn't want to read The Painted Veil because of it's differences from the film (which was more romantic and tragic) it reminded me that I had wanted to read Fight Club (the movie version of which starred Edward Norton) and that reminded me that I had wanted to read The Prestige (which did not star Edward Norton, but was up against The Illusionist which did). Whew...so it's all Edward Norton's fault.

The Prestige is a very good novel, and yet, the movie differs from it considerably. And I am still trying to figure out what exactly that means. The central premise is the same, AND HERE BE SPOILERS for both the film and the book, and yet key facts are very different.

The film ups the ante. In the novel Borden accidentally causes the death of Angier's unborn child and doesn't know it. In the movie his arrogance causes the death of Angier's wife and he is well aware of it. In the movie the "Pact" which allows Borden to do his spectacular trick leads to his wife's suicide. In the movie the women in Borden's life (or lives) seem perfectly content and unaware (a point that some characters cannot buy and neither can I). In the movie Angier injures Borden's hands--as important to a magician as to an artist or musician. In the book they merely disrupt each other's shows. In the movie, Angier frames Borden for his (Angier's death), when he is not "really" dead and knowing that only one of the twins will die. In the book, Borden does accidentally cause Angier's "death" and then Angier accidentally causes his.

All of these could be attributable to making it more exciting for the movie as could the discarding of the "modern" story line with the descendants of both men, but the ultimate change is that in Angier's version of the trick where Tesla's machine causes a duplicate to be made, in the book the original dies, like a shell that is discarded, and in fact, the bodies do not rot or decay--but are merely inconvenient to dispose of. In the movie--and this is the crux of whether we like either of the characters ultimately--Angier MUST kill the double each and every time the trick is performed--much more horrific and altering for Angier.

Of course, the underlying point/message of both is where obsession takes you--the half life of the Borden brothers, or the supernatural/superscience and ultimately soul killing answer of Angier. The final moments of the novel, when it seems that Angier has cheated even death with Tesla's machine--is nowhere to be found in the movie. Likewise, the careful presentation of the death and destruction (of birds and other animals) inherent in magic tricks of the time is carefully spelled out as a foreshadowing technique in the movie by Michael Caine's character and is not in the book.

Now, apparently, according to IMDB, Sam Mendes approached Priest about adapting the book but Priest only wanted the Nolan brothers to adapt and direct based on Memento and Following. So they took his book and made something completely different with the same materials--not better, per se, but very different.

How does one do that? How does one adapt a book at all, but especially to change it so fundamentally? Some books are considered unadaptable, and some directors (and their teams) have made a practice of adapting just those books. Interestingly, Sam Mendes is one of those directors. Another is Phillip Kaufman.

Kaufman directed (and for the most part did his own adaptions of) The Right Stuff, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Henry and June and Quills.

The first two considered too unwieldy and the last two being from diaries. I haven't read The Right Stuff, but I have read The Unbearable Lightness of Being, and while many would disagree, I think he did an amazing job adapting a novel whose narrative is so liquid and undefined. Likewise he did a very good job adapting the diaries of Nin and de Sade into a contained story line for an interesting and engaging film.

Now he had little to work with in terms of plot and so his movies are very different from these books, but the Priest novel has an abundance of plot which the Nolan brothers rewrote. I'm not quite sure what to make of that. How, as an author, Priest could be happy with the radical changes to his book--to create what his novel should have been? One of Nolan's favorite films is Blade Runner, and I have often referred to Blade Runner as an amazing film which bears little resemblance to it's source material in a way that diminishes neither. I'm not quite sure I can say the same here.

But at the same time, I respect the director/auteur's right to make a better film. Interestingly, often the more true a film is to its source, the less good it is as a piece of film. The BBC adaptations are excellent adaptations--they are seldom cinematically relevant. It is one of my sorrows with the recent adaptations of The Chronicles of Narnia. They are perfectly fine adaptations with minor changes to make the dialogue snappy and increase the action--Lewis was never a great describer of battles, etc., and yet I feel that they are somehow weaker than they could have been and I blame the director.

In contrast I consider Peter Jackson's movies of Tolkien both brilliant adaptations and amazing films in their own right--because he is a brilliant director AND because he was able to find the central piece and make it his own.

For all of their magic and creatures and Norse mythology, at their heart, TLOTR books are about a lost England. An England that Tolkien thought was gone in the chaos of WWI, in the industrial revolution (although, both he and Lewis wanted post-industrial amenities in their worlds, with pre-industrial impact). It is a love poem to England's mountains green. Peter Jackson's films are a love song to New Zealand's mountains green and it shows.

Which brings me back to my original point. The movie is more horrifying than the book, and I'm not sure if that diminishes the book, or increases it.

I feel so hip...

2008-12-18T09:48:00.001-05:00

The Airborne Toxic Event has a station identification spot for NBC! Caught it at the end of L&O last night! They're all crammed in a limo with their instruments like in their acoustic "Does This Mean You're Moving On?"

Shoes at Bush--Important enough to post twice

2008-12-16T09:49:00.001-05:00

I'm going to mail old shoes to Bush--I encourage you to do the same.

Some suggested messages:

It's not just one Iraqi, Mr. President.

Over 4,000 dead Americans--nearly 100,000 dead civilians. Injuries for decades to come.

Nice insurgency, Mr. President.

You said we'd be greeted as liberators.

Hey, hey, GWB
There's no saving your legacy.

And my personal favorite:
But if the cause be not good, the king himself hath a heavy reckoning to make, when all those legs and arms and heads, chopped off in battle, shall join together at the latter day and cry all 'We died at such a place;' some swearing, some crying for a surgeon, some upon their wives left poor behind them, some upon the debts they owe, some upon their children rawly left. I am afeard there are few die well that die in a battle; for how can they charitably dispose of any thing, when blood is their argument? Now, if these men do not die well, it will be a black matter for the king that led them to it; whom to disobey were against all proportion of subjection.
Henry V, Act IV--William Shakespeare

Music on the radio

2008-12-15T23:15:00.005-05:00

Isn't it funny, that one may have a CD/album at home, or even on one's mp3 player, available with a few flicks of the finger, and still be irrationally pleased to hear an old/obscure song on the regular radio?

This evening I heard 'Pulling Mussels From the Shell' by Squeeze and 'Call Me' by Blondie, both of which I can call up in seconds, but instead listened to on air.

No Libs

2008-12-15T23:07:00.003-05:00

Driving up to Lowell yesterday I was behind an enormous pick-up truck with a McCain sticker and a vanity plate that said, "NO LIBS." And I so wanted to follow him and ask, "No liberals? No libertarians? No women's lib? No liberation? No librarians? Or just no liberties?"

But I didn't because I'm not that crazy yet.

It's Not Easy Being Green

2008-12-14T10:48:00.002-05:00

A couple of months ago I bought at Target a little shopping bag that folds up and fits in one's purse. My husband had been using canvas bags and a large cooler bag to shop for groceries for some time, but I kept finding myself at a CVS or Target buying shampoo or something and having to either shove the item in my purse, carry it out to the car in my hand, or take a plastic bag.

For a little while I would forget I had it until the clerk had already bagged my item. Or I wouldn't say, "I don't need a bag," fast enough or loud enough. Sometimes I would forget to unpack it after buying, say craft supplies, and so wouldn't have it on the next shopping trip. But over time I've used it more and more.

We reused our plastic bags as much as we could already. Using them to line small trash cans, pick up after the dog, etc. But that only postpones their deposit in a land-fill. It's not like I was rinsing them out. Likewise at my job (which does not recycle) I use both sides of paper when it doesn't need to be fancy, but that only postpones, doesn't eliminate. My husband's office does shred and recycle--thank God.

At home we bag magazines, newspapers, catalogs, envelopes. Rinse out cans and boxes. The standard stuff. I have friends who have been sorting trash into 12 pails since the 60's or 70's depending on their age. Who've had a brick in their toilet and EnergyStar appliances as soon as they became available. They would think we don't do enough.

For instance, like parents debating cloth or disposable, the better option would be to use paper towels after my dog, but I buy sandwich bags or use plastic grocery bags because it's "icky." I recently bought a slightly larger trash can for my bathroom that won't take the plastic bags. I'm using large trash bags for the moment because our town just went to "special" garbage bags so these are useless, but when these run out, will I buy special sized ones or clean out my trash can each week?

Or the Christmas Tree. Any environmentalist would tell you what a waste that is. That a tree should be left alive in the woods, that the land used to grow Christmas Trees should be used for something useful and sustainable.

But I love real Christmas Trees...

Which is the same lame excuse that someone could use to justify their need for an SUV or cigarettes or any other thing that I consider beyond the pale. That we love it or it is more convenient.

Boycott Black Friday

2008-12-14T10:17:00.002-05:00

I hate Black Friday, always have and can't foresee a time when I don't. I mean that number one shopping day, the day after Thanksgiving. This is because I've been in retail and worked it, but fortunately I never worked at a store (as a salesperson) that really did well out of it--people aren't buying fabric on Black Friday.

But now someone has died, and quite frankly, I'm surprised it hasn't happened sooner. And the real horror isn't that this young man was accidentally trampled, but the fact that the shoppers became ANGRY when they were told that they had to leave. I can't even imagine--"Sorry, you died because somebody needed that big screen TV at Walmart prices."

I remember when I was working in visual merchandising and I was decorating a Christmas swag on Columbus Day (and before you wonder why stores have to decorate for Christmas before Halloween, let me remind you that our Macy's put up 52 Christmas Trees and 30 swags, plus numerous other decorations and displays--thank you to all of the shoppers who felt it was OK to come and insult us as we stood teetering on ladders--but that's a rant for another day) and the store was opening at noon. I was on a ladder near a mall entrance and for an hour before we opened I watched a crowd gather--faces pressed against the glass, as if they were starving and we were the only food.

And I thought, "I have to get off this ladder and have it packed away before that door opens or I am going to be knocked off."

Visual didn't even work the day after Thanksgiving--there was no point. We'd have spent our day directing traffic.

I also remember times when the power went out--both at House of Fabrics and at Macy's when people didn't want to leave--claimed they could keep shopping in the dark, even though we couldn't have rung them up. What is this madness?

And now you have stores opening at 4 AM, and shoppers waiting in line over Thanksgiving night all for some lottery on the lowest prices. Will this tragedy cause laws to be enacted like after the concert tramplings in the 70's?

My husband and I boycott Black Friday--we always have. We see no reason to go out at all, even if someone had $5 big screen TVs and $1 Wii's. We don't get groceries. We don't go to a movie. The only time I can remember going out was when we had just gotten our dog Guinness and we had to go to the vet.

I urge you and your family to do the same next year--stay home and be with your family instead of shopping for things.

Updates

2008-12-14T10:10:00.002-05:00

You will note that I have added both a simple Twitter link (now you can know what I'm doing EVERY MINUTE--aren't you excited?) and a topic cloud which is of course huge shoving my friends blogs way down to the bottom.

But now you can find any post quickly and easily--as can I--except for those I wrote before Blogger added tags... because you know, I should really stop and go back and tag those...

Wow, I didn't know that I wrote about myself so much, but I guess I'm not that surprised.

God Bless...

2008-12-11T13:36:00.002-05:00

I saw a banner today that said:

BUFFET
God Bless America

I tried to take a picture but somehow didn't frame it right.

Thank you God for all-you-can-eat buffets.

The Airborne Toxic Event and Franz Ferdinand

2008-12-10T20:43:00.004-05:00

We went to a concert last Saturday. I bought the tickets on mad impulse just before my job went into freefall. The mad impulse was because I had only heard one song by the first band at that point. But I loved it, loved it, loved it. So after I had bought the tickets I bought the album and didn't love it on first listen, but it grew on me--BUT I knew my husband wouldn't like it. So I told him to listen to it and the Monday before the show he sends me an email that says, "You were right. I don't like it."

Aggghhhh!!!

But I heard the band live on the radio and they were more amazing live so I convinced him. Plus he likes Franz Ferdinand more than I do. In retrospect he gave in more easily than I expected. Must be the meds.

It was part of a two night show by my favorite radio station called "Miracle on Tremont Street." The second night was The Black Kids (how do they get away with that name?) and Vampire Weekend, and I'm sorry I'm just not that into VW.

So the show was terrific. The venue, the Orpheum Theater, is a great place to see shows and we had very good seats, the second closest we've ever been at the Orpheum. Unfortunately we were on the front corner of a section so we tended to have people crossing in front of us during the set changes.

We only caught the last two songs of the opening act and were quite underwhelmed.

This is the song that I love by The Airborne Toxic Event:

This is the same song done acoustically--squee.

My husband had to agree that they are better live--you have to love a rock band with a viola player. During the show the bassist played his bass with a bow on some songs. I think they need a good producer to really tighten them up while keeping the rawness--rather as Eno did for U2. The album is a little overproduced and several songs have the same shape as if they can't trust a song to just be but need to add the crashing guitars each time.

This is the second single done acoustically as well. I NEED to get an album of the acoustic stuff.

And this is also the acoustic version and very funny:

The name is from a Don Delillo book in case you are wondering. Followed by a band named after the assassinated Archduke. Gotta love it.

Franz Ferdinand came out of Scotland in 2002 as part of that new British Invasion (that somehow also contained The Killers f(O_o)

I first saw the second half of this video and told my husband that he would love it. I was right.
(The embedding has been disabled so here's the link)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QM4dxI0mO1k

You have to watch until at least the minute mark to really appreciate the genius of Franz Ferdinand.

My husband said that he understood why I like TATE so much--it's a lyric band. The lyrics are full of longing, loneliness and loss.

FF on the other hand is not so much about lyrics--although they are often clever.
This is my favorite song by them:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F_uhyeVrkig

I think the lyrics are hilarious! "Not to look you in the shoes, but the eyes." Even funnier if you know who Terry Wogan is.

Both bands were brilliant live--serious musicianship and showmanship, which I was not entirely expecting.
On this song, as in this live version, they ended by all four band members and a roadie playing on the drum set with no other instruments. Amazing.

I also found that the lead singer sounded even better live. That doesn't happen that often.

And one last one--for Musing--smexy...

One shoe down

2008-12-10T20:41:00.002-05:00

The really cool job no longer exists--maybe by 2nd quarter.

Trying not to let this discourage me into a deep and immobile funk.

Having little confidence in my present company and even less desire to work hard for them, I am struggling with my happy face.

WARNING--Bad Pun alert

2008-12-08T12:12:00.003-05:00

Getting ready to watch House a few weeks ago, I said to my husband, "So, since we watch House on Tuesdays, does that make them our Housian (halcyon) days?"

He rightly threw a pillow at me.

The Things You See When You Don't Have Your Camera (and where I've been)

2008-12-03T20:34:00.010-05:00

One morning last week, as I was walking out to my car, I saw, out of the corner of my eye, the darting shadow of a squirrel, but something seemed wrong--the shadow seemed distorted, like some grotesque Tim Burton squirrel come to terrorize my morning ritual. But no, walking around the tree I could see that the distortion was due to the intrepid squirrel holding an ENTIRE bagel in his mouth as he danced up the tree...

Then, working through the giant rotary (the nightmare curse of New England) I found myself behind some modest behemoth of an SUV wherein every surface was covered with yellow chintz! The seats the headrests, even down to the little useless one in the middle of the backseat!
So I didn't have a camera, and digging for my camera phone with its limited capability didn't seem worth it.

I did have my camera in Scottsdale, AZ where I went for our Summit.

The first picture is of the golf course. The resort was very beautiful--very new, and so shiny that it gave me the eerie feeling that I was in a game of Myst. This postcards shows it even more. Of course, all photos are suspect now--colors tweaked, imperfections removed--but it really had a hyper-real quality.

At night it was cold and we gathered around the fire pit while a bagpiper played.

And next to the coffee shop was this statue--Ode to the coffee bean... In Myst it would be a vital clue, or guardian of a passageway.

Anyway--like last year, the conference had me busy, but also, the thing that I referenced in my last post had me distracted.

Basically, my company came to me and said they had no money and needed to lay me (and three others) off, but would I mind getting them through the Summit in a month? They'd understand if I didn't want to...yada yada. The conference was already paid for--much as AIG claimed as an excuse for their going ahead with their retreats after their bailout--so that cancelling would cost more than going. Well, having a job seemed better than not having a job AND I could look for another job openly, rather than furtively. And I believed that I could stay true to the job. I tried, but there were certainly afternoons when I thought, "Why am I working hard for this company again?" But the conference is like designing a show. Somehow something has to be there when the audience arrives. So I did everything I had to do to the best of my ability, but the things that were more optional or long-term I found I didn't start.

I also went on a very good interview for a very cool company for a position that seemed designed for me. As someone who rather fell into Marketing, I was finding positions that wanted Marketing degrees, wanted years of experience, wanted specialization in web design, or SEO or research, etc. This company wanted someone who understood marketing, but wasn't too high and mighty to do the grunt work on a website or a mailing.

So with that interview behind me I went off to the summit, enjoyed Scottsdale and got a facial. During the conference my current company said they appreciated how hard I had worked and that they felt they really couldn't afford to let me go. However, I am still wary of their precarious financial position, but unfortunately, the cool company can't make a decision on that position because of the precarious financial situation in the country.

So....I am waiting for something to shift--for the other job to come through, or for this company to go under. I continue to look for work, and to spend money for Christmas and other things, but there are certainly things I've denied myself that I wouldn't have if things were more stable.

And jumping back into blogging. It seemed wrong to just come and post some random tidbit without explanation. But by the nature of posting, this will move down and people checking in won't find it under all the other things.

I'd like to get back into it, as it helps me clarify thoughts. And there are things I'd like to put out there.

Another reason for silence has been my discovery of Facebook (and the addiction to my new phone--an expenditure I probably didn't need, but cannot regret). Social Media is a strange world, but more on that later.

Seen

2008-10-25T09:39:00.001-04:00

Smoke hangs in the air
Earthbound fading cloud
The smoker is gone