It's clever, but is it art?

Obligatory new!Trek review.

2009-05-10T09:43:04Z

So. I went ahead and saw the new Star Trek movie, since everyone is talking about it.

I was expecting to have more of a reaction to it. Like, to either like it more, or hate it more. My lack of reaction is probably due to the fact that I’ve been reading spoilers for a couple of days now -- something I normally would never, ever do. Normally, I avoid spoilers like the plague. But this time... I figured I’d be better off preparing myself beforehand for just how much I was going to hate this movie. And it seems to have worked, because I didn’t hate it. But I definitely didn't love it, either.

I figure it was pretty much inevitable that, sooner or later, somebody was going to decide to hijack TOS and remake it. And as plot devices go, the alternate-universe time-travel business they came up with for this movie was actually pretty ingenious. If it had to be done -- and I suppose it did have to be done -- then I can’t think of a better way they could have done it. So, all right. Props for that.

However, I've got to say... I don’t really see what the problem is. Vulcan is destroyed? Big deal. Future!Spock certainly knows how to fix this, even if the kiddies don’t. Just take a quick loop around the sun -- I mean a really quick loop, like warp ten -- and bingo, you’re right back in the middle of last week. And since now you know how to kick some Romulan ass, you can intercept the villains before they even get to Vulcan, prevent Pike from being abducted in the first place, and maybe even pick up some whales on the way home.

Come on, kid!Kirk. Kirk Prime did it in a fucking Klingon Bird of Prey! If you can’t do that shit even with the Enterprise at your command, you are not Kirk, boy.

But anyway. I actually thought the kid who played Kirk did a decent job, and looked more like Kirk than any of the other actors looked like the characters they were supposed to be playing. He was a bit too much of an arrogant asshole, even for Kirk, but I guess we can chalk that up to his having been raised without a father. Most of his lines sounded appropriately Kirk-esque, although there were a few modernisms in his speech that jarred me a bit. (He shouldn’t sound like it's the sixties, no, but he shouldn’t sound like it's 2009, either. Eh.)

I wasn't much into his flippant attitude about the Kobayashi Maru. Kirk cheats all the time, but not like that. His cheating is, in itself, impressive and praiseworthy, not just obnoxious. Him sitting there nonchalantly munching an apple while his problems resolve themselves... didn't fit.

Spock was... I don’t know. I think he really did try, and he wasn’t bad, but he just wasn’t Spock, either. He was, I will grant, more like Spock than most of the other Vulcans they’ve had in the episodes and movies over the years, and I do give him credit. In most cases, it wasn’t even his acting, but the script that screwed up his Spock-ness. And also his voice. He so does not even come close to having Spock’s voice. But, I mean, how can I blame him for that? Nobody has Spock’s voice. Even Spock Prime doesn’t have Spock’s voice anymore. *sigh*

But toward the end, Kirk and Spock had a few moments that did sort of feel like Kirk-Spock moments. Spock’s expression when Kirk slapped him on the shoulder was perfect. And when Spock called Kirk "Jim" for the first time, in that little shuttlecraft-type thing, I almost believed it.

They were... closer than I’d expected, I guess. Just not close enough.

The consensus online seems to be that Karl Urban made a great McCoy. Personally, I can’t see him as McCoy at all. The scripting for him was fine, if a little over-the-top -- he did all the things McCoy does, but rather more forcefully and bitterly than the *cough* real McCoy. It’s really not Urban’s fault; he played the part just fine. He just looks nothing like McCoy, and every time he was onscreen I was like, wait, who is he supposed to be again? Scotty? (And why was he working on the bridge all the time, anyway?)

Speaking of Scotty, wow, that was SO NOT SCOTTY, it is not even funny. He was not even an alternate-universe!Scotty in any conceivable way. He has a Scottish accent and is an engineer, and there the similarities end. I don’t entirely blame the actor, since the script was really the problem there, but I don’t feel like the actor made much of an effort to overcome the faults of the script, either. :P

And Uhura was also not Uhura in any conceivable way. At all. I never even bothered to remember that she was supposed to be Uhura, because it seemed so irrelevant. She has zero personality in common with Uhura. I didn’t hate her like a lot of people do, but that’s only because I just thought of her as a totally new character. I don’t know, maybe she’s Uhura’s sister or something...?

Also, Uhura/Spock. Hm. I was prepared for it, and although I disliked it, I didn’t hate it as much as I was expecting to, probably because the chick was SO ABSOLUTELY NOT UHURA. And Spock hooking up with random chicks has actually never bothered me too much (though I suspect that was usually because his ability to fall in love was the side-effect of some evil alien plot, to be resolved by the end of the episode...).

But anyway, WTF -- shouldn’t kid!Spock still be betrothed, or whatever, to T’Pring? Did the Romulans somehow fuck that up, too? And what is with everyone’s obsession with re-imagining Vulcans so that they’re actually a deeply emotional people who just don’t talk about it? Yes, they have the capacity for emotions, we get that. Do we need to be beaten over the head with it all the damn time? ‘Cause it kind of undermines the whole Spock-is-half-human thing, when all the other Vulcans are secretly just as human as he is.

For example, those kids making fun of him. I don’t see any logic in insulting the ambassador’s son. Spock was a lot more serene and rational than those Vulcan kids, it appeared to me (until he randomly and rather inexplicably blew up). Which is what seems to happen even in the original movies, too -- Spock is always more Vulcan than the other Vulcans! It is kind of starting to annoy me.

Also, while I’m talking about Vulcans: man, Spock’s dad made me so sad by not being Spock’s dad. Like, he didn’t do anything wrong. His acting was fine. The scripting was okay, although I do think that even in light of the events of the movie, he was rather too kind for Sarek. Sarek is a proper Vulcan, and always wanted his son to be a proper Vulcan, too -- and I really don’t think the fact that his planet got destroyed would make him any less proud of his Vulcan culture, or any less determined to hold to its traditions.

Mainly, though, it’s just that the guy was not Mark Lenard, and he was just. Not. Sarek. Which depressed me because I really do love Sarek, even though he's only a minor character and I probably shouldn't care.

(As an aside, I'm also not fond of the way they’re doing Vulcan ears now. I actually think they looked better the way they did them on TOS. Now they’re all... thick and fleshy and excessively veiny. :/ I don’t know, they look kind of swollen and bulbous to me. TOS!Vulcans had really pretty ears. Meh.)

Sulu. Well, he hardly got any screen time, but that’s usual for Sulu anyway. He was okay. There was one moment when he dropped his voice low, I don’t remember what he was saying -- probably something like, “Course laid in, sir,” or “Warp four, sir,” or something -- and he actually did sound like Sulu, and that was neat.

WTF is up with FENCING OF THE FUTURE, though? Okay, Sulu is obsessed with old-fashioned swordfighting, that’s consistent with his character; but why did the other dude just happen to have a battle-axe on hand? WHY DOES NOBODY ACTUALLY USE HAND-PHASERS IN THIS MOVIE?

Ahem. Chekov was also okay. He looked nothing like Chekov, but he was eager and excitable in a way that made sense for a seventeen-year-old Chekov. Not as sarcastic or exasperatedly-talking-to-himself as he should have been, except for that one tiny moment when he was left in command, but overall he did a good job.

Oh, and Pike. I thought it was really neat that they included Pike, but really weird that he bore no resemblance to the original Pike at all -- wasn't even the right age, had no physical characteristics in common... weird. I also can't figure out why the Romulans bothered to abduct him, since they seemed perfectly capable of destroying Earth without his help, and it didn't even seem like they bothered to torture him all that much. Obviously just a plot device to get Kirk in the captain's chair. Eh.

Anyway. I should probably get around to actually commenting on the plot of the movie here, and not just nitpick about how Sarek was not Mark Lenard and Spock's ears weren't pretty. Only... I don't know. It just doesn't really seem to matter.

The graphics were awesome. Lots of explosions, but nothing gratuitous. The script was well-written. All around, the thing was thoroughly entertaining. The plot was okay, although I’m dubious about the whole Romulan mining-vessel thing, and Captain Nero was way over the top. I am also annoyed that the Romulans had to look so evil. Like a bunch of goth motorcycle gangsters with facial tattoos. That felt rather cliché to me, and the whole vendetta that's like, “In the future this one dude will inadvertently fail to rescue my planet from a natural disaster, therefore I intend to brutally murder every civilization that bears any connection to him” is just... man, even the TOS villains weren’t that fucking crazy. The mental patients in TOS weren't that crazy. Sheez.

Also I’m not sure why Romulan mining vessels are, like, the size of a small moon, produce lightning storms in space, and are shaped like THE IRON TALONS OF PURE EVIL. Or, for that matter, why they happened to have lots of spare Instant Black Hole formula lying around. That doesn’t sound like something you’d need for mining. But whatever. Fine.

That’s not the point. The point is that, as ADVENTURES IN SPACE go, this one was pretty good. Better than most of the previous movies, I'd even say. Good script, fantastic graphics, great costuming, great sets. Decent plot, even. But the thing is, I don’t care about adventures in space. If I did, I’d be just as happy to go watch some other space show. I only care about Star Trek because of the characters, and since these guys are neither new characters whom I can learn to love, nor old characters whom I already love... I can’t really do anything with them. They’re not Kirk and Spock and McCoy, but they’re also not anyone else.

And for that reason, I kind of just don’t see the point.

I haven’t said anything yet about Spock Prime. I’m rather amazed at how he doesn’t look much older now than he did twenty years ago. I guess he got all his aging out of the way back in the eighties. Anyway, it was really nice to see him, and his scenes with kid!Kirk were rather nice, and made it feel a bit like it really was Star Trek after all. Some of the scripting for him felt a little off to me -- but then, he’s like eighty years older than he was in The Undiscovered Country, so I guess he would have changed a bit. (But I still don’t see why he’d rather set up new Vulcan colonies than just do some more time traveling. If it’s okay to go back in time just to save the damn whales, I think it’s okay to save Vulcan that way. But whatever.)

Even in spite of his advice to “do what feels right,” though, Spock Prime still acted more Vulcan than kid!Spock. He was still more calm and logical and objective than kid!Spock. Which is kind of inconsistent, but, again, whatever.

I think that’s pretty much all I have to say. At bottom, I guess I don’t really dislike the movie so much as the fact of the movie -- the inevitability of its taking over and replacing TOS as canon, and just... throwing everything that went before out the window. If it had to happen, I guess this is the best way for it to happen. I can see what they’re trying to do, and why they’re doing it. It’s fine. I just don’t really want anything to do with it.

Unless they make a trilogy and at the end of the third movie, they finally go back in time and set things right, so that Spock Prime can go back to being the real and only Spock again, and Vulcan can not get blown up. I would give them 100% credit and lots of applause, and even cheerfully accept their movies as canon, if they’d do that. But I’m not counting on it.

I'm a traditionalist. What can I say.

ETA: One more thing. Am I the only one who's annoyed by the way non-humanoid aliens are treated in movies? In this case, I'm talking about the little alien dude from McCoy's outpost, whose sole purpose seemed to be comic relief; he just got in the way, and Kirk had to pick him up like a little kid at one point. Yeah, he's small and cute and doesn't speak English, but if he works here, he's probably an intelligent being with some sense of dignity. ONLY HE ISN'T. Because that wouldn't be funny. :/ Look, people, don't go trying to make points about prejudice and equality if you're going to also be all LOL SMALL ALIENS THEY ARE HILARIOUS.

Ahem. /rant.

ETA #2: Okay, make that two more things, because I can't believe I omitted to say this before. The absolute worst thing, I think, about the entire movie, is the way Kirk blows up the Romulan ship at the end. Yes, he does offer to beam the Romulans aboard first, and that was in keeping with Kirk as we know him. But when the Romulans refuse to come aboard, he seems delighted that he now gets to kill them, and his whole attitude about firing all phasers and blowing the hell out of the Romulan vessel is just... so, so wrong. Mercy is one of the most fundamental themes of the Star Trek series, and while I can see why the ship had to be destroyed, and can certainly understand why it would be impossible for Kirk to feel any sympathy or even good-will toward the Romulans, there's no call for his simply being a guns-blazing video-game-space-war-commander asshole. The Kirk we know would gladly give his life to prove that Starfleet is just, honorable, and devoted to making peace. This Kirk seems to be raring for war.

(Speaking of that last scene, I also was not amused by Spock's, "Not really, no. Not this time." Don't get me wrong, it was certainly in character for him to slip there, and not want to extend mercy to the guys who just blew up his entire planet. If anything, his reaction should have been stronger. TOS!Spock would have been tight-lipped and suppressing a very dangerous rage, and if he turned Kirk aside to ask him what he was doing, it would be with tangible restraint and, probably, murder in his eyes. But the line they gave Spock in this movie was supposed to be funny. You're supposed to laugh at his little human slip-up and how amusingly illogical it is. Guys, his planet is gone. It's not funny. Don't give him comic relief lines. Just. Do not.)

ETA #3: THIS. <-- (You probably won't want to read this if you liked the movie.)

Book meme

2009-05-01T04:17:13Z

Book meme from hamsterwoman and sheiannasherra. In case anyone was worried that I'd stopped caring about books lately...

1. What author do you own the most books by?

*counts*

Er. It appears the answer is Stephen King, with ten books. The runner up is Dostoevsky, though, with seven -- and I've read all the Dostoevsky books I own, which is not true of the King ones. (Although I've also read a number of King books that I don't own, so I guess King still probably wins.)

2. What book do you own the most copies of?

I have three copies of The Picture of Dorian Gray. I used to have three copies of Les Miserables, but I gave one to zinniazayda. :)

3. What fictional character are you secretly in love with?

What, just one? Heh. Well, Sherlock Holmes is the first that comes to mind, although "in love with" might be less accurate than "completely fascinated and intrigued by." Which would also describe my sentiments toward Lord Denethor. My favorite fictional character is Claude Frollo (or, more broadly, Faust); but I am not in love with him at all. Not in the usual sense, anyway.

4. What book have you read more than any other?

I've read The Hunchback of Notre-Dame at least three times, but maybe four. I can't remember. I've also read Les Miserables three times, though the first time it was the abridged edition. ...Apparently I enjoy rereading Hugo.

5. What was your favorite book when you were ten years old?

The Black Stallion. I liked the sequels, too, but the first book was always my favorite.

6. What is the worst book you’ve read in the past year?

I haven't read any bad books this past year. I rarely bother to finish books I don't like. I guess The Golden Compass is the book I enjoyed the least, but it wasn't bad, and I do still intend to read the others in the series.

7. What is the best book you’ve read in the past year?

I suppose I'll have to choose War and Peace. I made plenty of exasperated comments about Tolstoy while I was reading it, but now that I've stepped back a bit, I remember it fondly and am even inclined to go back and reread passages of it. It really is one of the best books I've ever read, objectively speaking. There were just some things about it that irritated the heck out of me, so it's still not one of my favorites.

My favorite book from this past year's reading is Atlas Shrugged, surprisingly enough. I had lots of exasperated comments to make about that one, too, and I think I disagreed with Rand even more often than with Tolstoy... but for some reason I wound up really loving the book anyway.

8. If you could tell everyone reading this to read one book, what would it be?

I don't even know. People have such different taste in books, I hate to presume. I guess I'll say Les Miserables, because I think people who haven't read it have rather a different impression of it than those who have. greekhoop and I were talking about it the other day, and about the way Hugo gets pegged as a Romantic, not entirely unjustly, but not entirely justly, either. He's more of a transitional author between Romanticism and Realism, and every time I go back and reread a passage from one of his books, I'm surprised by how much I still adore him.

9. What is the most difficult book you’ve ever read?

Joyce's Ulysses, apparently, since I still haven't finished it! :/ I don't know how I can love Joyce so much and still have so much trouble actually finishing his book, especially since I love Ulysses more than anything else I've read of his. But it's difficult to get in the right mindframe to give him the attention he deserves.

10. Do you prefer the French or the Russians?

Oh god. Are you seriously making me choose?

I guess I have to choose the Russians, since I like so many of them. I've certainly read much more Russian literature than French. But if I have to choose between my favorite authors, Hugo and Dostoevsky... they're very different, and I love them for very different reasons, but I can't say which I prefer. (Luckily, Dostoevsky also loved Hugo, so at least I don't have to feel like I'm giving either of them offense...)

11. Shakespeare, Milton or Chaucer?

Shakespeare, then Milton, then Chaucer. (Which is not the order hamsterwoman or sheiannasherra put them in!)

12. Austen or Eliot?

I haven't read anything by Austen, so Eliot by default.

13. What is the biggest or most embarrassing gap in your reading?

Probably The Odyssey, The Iliad, and The Aenead. I've started each of them multiple times, and I still intend to read them, but for some reason I have a difficult time caring what happens from one page to the next. :/

14. What is your favorite novel?

The Hunchback of Notre-Dame, by Victor Hugo. Moby Dick and Dostoevsky's The Idiot are also high on the list.

15. Play?

Either "Hamlet" or Tom Stoppard's "The Real Thing." Almost certainly "Hamlet," actually, but that just sounds so typical...

16. Poem?

My standard answer to this question is Coleridge's "Kubla Khan." There is also "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" and Larkin's "Aubade," and the Kipling poem that's on my profile page ("The Conundrum of the Workshops"), and... really too many things to list.

17. Essay?

I rarely read essays. The only one I can recall particularly enjoying is by Guy Endore, and is not exactly an essay, but a transcription of a lecture he gave, which he then printed as the twelfth chapter of his novel "Satan's Saint," which is a kind of fictionalized biography of the Marquis de Sade. The novel itself is only mediocre, but the essay, which discusses how mankind glorifies war and vulgarizes sex, in effect praising destruction and shaming creation, is very excellent.

18. Short Story?

If Dickens' "A Christmas Carol" counts as a short story, then that. If it needs to be shorter, then possibly Gogol's "The Overcoat" or Borges' "The Immortal." I'm not so much a fan of short fiction, though, so I'm afraid I've read much less of it than I should have.

19. Non Fiction

Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil, hands down. :)

20. Graphic Novel?

Neil Gaiman's Season of Mists. There are others I could list, but none that I like more than that one.

21. Science Fiction?

Lord of Light, unless you want to count that as fantasy (it's somewhere in between, technically more sci-fi, but with a very fantasy feel to it). In that case, 1984.

22. Who is your favorite writer?

Fyodor Dostoevsky. Followed by Hugo, Melville, and Wilde.

Actually, hamsterwoman chose to interpret "writer" as opposed to "author" as indicating a focus on style rather than overall composition. If I follow her example, I'll be torn between Joyce, Nabokov, and -- Nietzsche. And Melville, actually. And, um, Shakespeare and Stoppard. Oy.

Let's just stick with Dostoevsky to keep things simpler, shall we?

23. Who is the most over rated writer alive today?

I don't know much about writers who are alive today, I'm afraid. I tend to think most modern authors are overrated. The only exception I can think of is Chuck Palahniuk, who is really, really good. There are other good authors, of course, but none I've noticed who actually seem as good as they're reported to be.

24. What are you reading right now?

Nothing, actually. :/ Except my Russian Lit textbook. I left off about halfway through Dubliners a few weeks back, and intend to resume as soon as I get my brain back, though.

25. Best Memoir?

I've never read a memoir. I've read portions of Claude Francois Meneval (Napoleon's secretary)'s "Memoirs of the Courts of Europe," and enjoyed them, but have not yet gotten around to reading them straight through.

26. Best History?

I've never read a history book.

27. Best Mystery or Noir?

And I've never read any mysteries except for Sherlock Holmes. From the Holmes collection, I'd say the best is The Hound of the Baskervilles, or perhaps The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, but my favorite is The Sign of the Four. Though I'm afraid its being my favorite has nothing to do with the mystery (which is stupid) and everything to do with Holmes playing violin and shooting up drugs.

it takes me way the hell too long to fill these things out

2009-03-20T09:36:49Z

Last night, at like three in the morning, I suddenly woke up, opened my eyes, and thought: "Yes, that is the overwhelming question. What would Lazarus say? If one could come back from the dead, what would one say?"

That's right. Apparently, I was endeavoring to conduct a literary analysis of T. S. Eliot in my sleep.

And apparently symbolist poetry is the only thing my subconscious thinks should be interpreted in a literal, linear way. Go figure.

Anyhow. From hamsterwoman: a meme about LJ.

How did you come to start your LJ?

Once upon a time, back in, oh, 2003, I guess, the Les Miserables Fan Fiction Index had a message board, and a lovely message board it was. I met a lot of people whose fan fiction I'd been reading for years, and had a lot of discussions about Victor Hugo, and 19th century France, and anachronisms in fanfic, and so on. I met the kind of people who not only liked reading and writing slash, but could also answer questions about what sort of cassock an archdeacon would have worn circa 1482 in Paris. Good times.

Anyway, at that time, mhari started a weekly Les Miserables drabble challenge called gleamswhichpass, on LJ. In those days you couldn't join LJ without an invite code, but someone on the message boards was nice enough to give me one. (estllechauvelin, I think? Or maybe petronelle?)

For my first year on LJ, I only used my journal in order to make posts to gleamswhichpass. But then I realized that, in spite of the fact that I never posted, a few folks from the Les Mis boards had friended me... so I went ahead and started using the journal. :)

I still have a lot of Les Mis fans on my friends-list, though almost none of them ever write about Les Mis anymore, and some of them I don't even associate with Les Mis anymore (I'm looking at you, axmxz ;). There's gamesiplay, caudelac, taskir, rainbowjehan, maenid, dreamsofstars, latin_cat... and undoubtedly some more people that I'm forgetting...

How did you find your first friends?

See above. :) They were all Les Mis people, at first. Then I got into some M*A*S*H and Lord of the Rings groups, and made some friends there.

Are those first friends still on your FL?

Apart from the first few Les Mis folks, I think my earliest friends were minttown1, celiloquoy, zoepaleologa, and annamilton. They're all still on my friends list, though annamilton seems to have disappeared. Well, and a couple of Les Mis people have dropped me, since we don't have much in common anymore. But I still enjoy reading their posts.

How long have you been on LJ?

I got my journal in May of 2003, so technically, six years. But I didn't start posting in it until 2004.

Do you have more friends or communities on your FL?

Friends, definitely. Most of the communities I'm "watching" are communities no one even posts to anymore, and I've just never bothered to delete them. The only communities I really pay any attention to these days are mash_slash and cox_and_co (Sherlock Holmes), and I barely even read those.

Do you do a lot of friends cuts? What would make you un-friend someone immediately?

I do defriend people, if I decide I don't want to read their journals anymore. So far, I've never defriended anyone without waiting a while -- usually several months -- to see if I'll feel differently about them in time. Even if they're doing something that really annoys me (like ranting in every single post they make about how much they hate Dostoevsky), I'll still wait a few weeks before dropping them from my friends list.

The only person I ever defriended sort-of-immediately was this girl who kept fuming about how bad other people's grammar was, apparently unaware that her own grammar was horrible -- on top of which, every single one of her icons was grossly pornographic. :/

What do you like in an LJ friend? What do you dislike?

I like people who make interesting posts. What defines "interesting" I can't exactly say; with some people it's a matter of content, with others it's a matter of their writing style, or the fact that I've known them so long that even the most banal details about their day-to-day activities interest me, because reading them is a way of keeping in touch, sort of.

I dislike people who post large images without using a cut tag, and people who have absolutely no tact in leaving comments. And people who prefer their own special arbitrary grammar rules over the ones that actually belong to the English language.

Have you been caught up in a lot of LJ drama?

No, I don't do drama. Well -- okay, wait. I was one of the first people to leave deleterius, somewhat vocally, when the mod refused to take down her new community icon, which was a swastika. Apparently my departing post was dramatic enough that it made it to Fandom Wank, though most of the Fandom Wank comments were about how fucked up the swastika was, and not how wanky my post was, so.

I've also been corrected a couple of times for replying to inappropriate posts with sarcastic macros. Like, one time, someone posted an advertisement in a literary fanfic community asking people to buy their nude art, and requesting volunteers to do nude modeling for them for free. I replied with a Holmes/Watson macro, and was politely asked not to do anything like that again. Which... isn't exactly drama, but it's sort of close, maybe?

Here's the macro, by the way. I don't even know who made it, but it's awesome. XD

Do RL friends and family members know you have a journal on LJ?

Sure. At this point they're even quite used to my calling it "LJ," and referring to people with strange names like hamsterwoman. XD

Do you also have Facebook and if so, what do you prefer – LJ or FB? What about Twitter? Do you blog on any other sites?

I got a Facebook a couple of weeks ago because a My Little Pony trader wanted to talk to me on the Facebook instant messenger thingy. I keep meaning to delete my account, because I have no intention of using it.

And I abhor Twitter. I loathe Twitter. If I could block Twitter from importing its pointlessness to my friends page, I would do so. (Sorry, people who use Twitter. I just. I do not get it.)

How often do you check in on LJ?

Like... constantly. XD Well, no, but a few times a day, anyway.

What do you rarely or never post about? Why don’t you post about that?

Well, obviously there are lots of things I never post about, like polo, cheese graters, and Charles Darwin's wife, because why would I post about them?

But, eh. Generally, I don't post about anything that's actually important to me, because there seems to be an inverse law attached to that sort of thing: the more important the subject is to me, the less anyone else will care to read about it. And if I'm just talking to myself anyway, there's no reason to do it online.

Have you ever thought about deleting your journal?

Yeah. Not deleting the journal itself, since I'd still want to be able to log in and read my friends-list, but I've thought of deleting all my old posts and just... not posting anymore. Because I really don't think anyone here is interested in the kinds of posts I want to make, and I'm not interested in most of the posts I actually do make, so it's all sort of pointless.

Why did you choose your current username? Have you ever changed your username?

I picked _grayswandir_ because grayswandir was already taken. (By some Russian dude, of course. :P What is it with Zelazny and Russians?) My second choice would have been "Dostoevsky's Mouse," but that was too many characters, even without the space. So underscores it is.

(That kind of didn't explain at all, did it? Oops. Well, "Grayswandir" comes from Roger Zelazny's Chronicles of Amber. It's the name of Prince Corwin's sword, the Night Blade.)

If you’re looking for new friends, how do you find them? Are you taking new people on to your Friends List just now?

I never go looking for new friends, but sometimes I happen upon people whose journals I want to continue reading, and when I do, I add them. :)

Finally, tell us the reasons why you keep an online journal.

I don't even know. Because there are a lot of people here that I like, and I want to read their journals. So I come up with things to post, to remind everyone that I haven't disappeared.

Brave New World. Also, Walden Two.

2009-03-05T02:27:05Z

Ah yes -- yet another great, rambling book review post.

This time, the topic is Brave New World.

First of all, though this may be a little beside the point, I have to mention that I spent a good portion of this novel just gaping in amaze at the fact that it was written in 1932. I literally did not believe it, and kept thinking the copyright date must somehow refer to something else. I mean, there are televisions all bloody over the place, and according to Wikipedia the very first electronic television -- a rather primitive and inconvenient one -- had only just been invented in 1928. Yet Huxley did not fail to predict that televisions, in the future, would be able to reproduce the most subtle of images, in color and accompanied by sound... and he even went further to predict that even touch and smell would soon enter into the picture; in effect that entire virtual worlds would be created, like the Hologram Deck on the Enterprise, or The Matrix or something. There's even a man wearing some unwieldy headgear that's basically a cellular phone with an earpiece and an attached camera. In 1932.

Which is to say nothing of all the science! The hormone supplements and chemical injections, the genetic engineering and experimentation (years yet before World War II, mind), the behavioral conditioning -- it's simply unbelievable. And the unabashed promiscuity! In 1932! That he was even able to publish such a thing, with its careless references to how children used to be forbidden to have sex, and had to get by with a bit of masturbation and homosexuality... I realize Freud had opened up these lines of discourse quite a bit, but nevertheless. 1932.

Anyway. As to the novel itself.

To begin with, I give Huxley enormous credit for writing his fictional universe as though it were not merely real, but perfectly natural and unsurprising. The technique worked beautifully, especially since he made a point of introducing all the most outrageous customs right away, in the first few pages, so that everything from there on was quite easy to accept.

Here and there, I'll admit, he slipped up, and some inconsistency was apparent. For instance, the changing rooms. In a future where promiscuity is practically law, and children play naked sex games almost from infancy, what the devil is the point of putting men and women in separate changing rooms? Also, the entire last chapter made very little sense to me. (Why would John be allowed to stay at the lighthouse? I assumed he had sneaked away in secret, and that as soon as word of his whereabouts got back to London, Mustafa Mond would have him dragged back so that the "experiment" could continue. At the very least, surely Mustafa Mond would have had to do something about his persistently antisocial behavior, which was becoming a sensation likely to decondition the whole upper-caste population...)

And then there were the London news reporters, also in that final chapter. They behaved very suspiciously like members of a free press, asking all sorts of questions that could not possibly have returned socially acceptable answers. And who would have approved the publication of a feely consisting entirely of John flagellating himself bloody? To show them that solitude is a bad option? But the whole point, I thought, was not to let them realize that they had options or free will at all -- not even the will to choose to suffer. Merely putting the idea of willingly suffering into their heads sounds like a dangerous mistake.

I found Mustafa Mond interesting, though; he reminded me a little of Dostoevsky's Grand Inquisitor and a little of Lord Vetinari. There was something decidedly villainous about him, even though he really did only ever act for the greater good... there seemed something very vindicated and aloof and even hypocritical about his sacrificing himself for the greater good. As for Bernard Marx, I was glad that he turned out to be a coward. At first I imagined that he would wind up a hero in the end -- but no: he remained believable and pathetic, self-important and insecure. I thought Lenina would be converted, too. But I don't think she was. Much praise to Huxley for that.

John the Savage, however, was a bit of a problem.

He reminded me a little of Mike from Stranger in a Strange Land, on account of his impeccable alien saintliness and his ridiculous and inexplicable mental abilities. Look -- the kid grows up on a Reservation with Indians who speak no English and, anyhow, dislike him, so that his sole source of English vocabulary is his mother, who doesn't know a single damn thing beyond what she used to have to know to do her job. And this kid -- he just picks up Shakespeare one day and immediately falls in love with him. Might as well say he picked up the bloody Canterbury Tales in the original Middle English! Even if John were an honest-to-god genius, with an IQ somewhere up in the 200 range, he'd have simply no frame of reference for anything that takes place in Shakespeare, never mind the vocabulary and syntax.

I'm not too sure about his religious mania, either, given his upbringing. His mother certainly didn't teach him to be devout or self-sacrificing, but encouraged instead just the opposite behavior, while the Indians -- the only ones from whom he could have learned to be devout -- mocked him and refused to include him in their ceremonies, and insulted his mother. And since he loved his mother and hated that the Indian children called her a whore, how is it that he came to despise Lenina as a whore.

But admittedly, his conditioning was rather haphazard, and who knows how he would have grown up. Anyway the ideas he expresses to Mustafa Mond in their conversation together are very, very nice. I think Huxley perhaps availed himself a little too much of Shakespeare's eloquence, but even so, that scene was the highlight of the book for me.

Now then, I also recently read another utopian/distopian novel, Skinner's Walden Two. Skinner is a great deal more systematic and rational than Huxley, and probably would have liked to point out that Huxley's most effective tools are rhetoric and pathos (often courtesy of Shakespeare), and not reason. I think this is true. And yet I'm afraid I side with Huxley all the same.

To give an overview of Walden Two would take some time, since Skinner makes a point of never speaking in generalizations, but always in details. But basically, the book is about a professor who goes to visit a utopian society called Walden Two, and learns just how the society is run. At its root, the whole system is based on honesty and positive reinforcement. I think it's easiest to explain by beginning at the end.

Near the end of the book, the professor has a conversation with Frazier, the mastermind behind Walden Two. In this conversation, Frazier admits that he himself is not as pure and selfless and genuine as those who live in his society; he has always had a lust for power and control. But, he says, over the course of his life, he realized that the only way to really exercise control without being sure to lose it in the end, is to actually act in the best interests of those you are controlling. It's not enough to convince them that you mean well: you must really mean it, and do it.

Frazier does not believe that men have free will; he believes they are programmed by genetic and environmental factors to desire certain things more than others, and can't help acting in accordance with their programmed desires. In the perfect utopia, men don't even need free will, because they're always able to choose the thing they want most. Why would they want to be free to choose anything else?

This is very much like Brave New World. The community of Walden Two is designed so that every member is behaviorally engineered, from birth, to want to do the things that will be best for society as a whole. Unlike Huxley, however, Skinner doesn't think deception or punishment are necessary.

He also sees nothing unethical in the idea of behaviorally engineering people, and points out that in normal society, people are manipulated and programmed by all sorts of people -- parents, teachers, priests, managers, advertisers, officials, and so on. To manipulate a child's behavior is not evil; it's the very meaning of parenting. The idea of Walden Two is to turn parenting into a precise science, thus developing a society full of stable, capable, and genuinely happy individuals.

Frazier actually compares himself to Christ. He considers Christ the first behaviorist, and "love thy enemy" the first example of a man preaching positive reinforcement rather than negative. He very literally identifies "love" as being identical to positive reinforcement, and on that ground, he claims to love all the citizens of Walden Two in a truly godlike fashion. He considers himself almost superior to God, in fact -- because he did not throw his people willy-nilly into a garden full of forbidden fruit without any defenses; he was careful to instill in them every possible defense, and to plan their future so that they are almost certain to be happy.

But besides making men happy, Frazier is also interested in something else: developing a precise science of human behavior -- something that can only be done by experimentation, not mere theoretical speculation. It was necessary for him to set up an experiment which was totally genuine, and to have test subjects who were sincere and undeceived. He expects that in time, genetic engineering and behavioral engineering will allow mankind to develop a better mankind: to breed better artists, mathematicians, musicians, architects, and even better behavioral engineers.

Which is an idea that I find, frankly, more than a little unnerving. So, On with some general reactions to all this -- both Huxley and Skinner.

Skinner's utopia is certainly much harder to attack than Huxley's, which is in keeping with their respective intents. But it's interesting that utopia and distopia don't really seem to be opposites. Rather, in a utopia, everyone is happy. In a distopia, no one is free. Huxley makes this the theme of his whole novel -- what are the relative merits of happiness and freedom? There are huge sacrifices that must be made for happiness, and they include glory and passion and dignity and grandeur and the pursuit of truth. Is it worth such sacrifices, to be happy? Huxley seems to think not. Nevertheless, his future-London is both a distopia and a utopia. No one is free. But everyone is happy.

Skinner, meanwhile, considers it possible to create a future where men are both happy and free -- because he takes a much more scientific view of what "freedom" actually means. This is where Huxley, invoking freedom and truth and glory, persuades by rhetoric. But Skinner is much more sober and literal, and I kind of hate it that he's probably, technically, right.

What is it that's so horrible about the idea of Man improving himself by genetic and behavioral engineering? It's just so impersonal and clinical. We want to be our own gods, to pull ourselves up by our own bootstraps; we want free will to enter into it somehow, and we want our progress to mean something. We recoil at the idea of genetically improving Man because that sounds like Frankenstein, like molding the sacred clay of life with our own grubby mortal fingers, and, worst of all, like mechanizing the whole beautiful mystery that is the spirit of a human being.

And yet science proves ever more irrefutably that there is no beautiful mystery of the human spirit. There are genetics and complicated systems for interpreting and responding to stimuli, but there is no mystical secret. If we want to improve ourselves, what sense in mucking about with poetry? Hard science will do the trick.

The thing I can't help thinking is that, once we've proven and accepted that Man is merely a system, to be improved with each new edition like a damned household appliance... isn't it simpler just to kill him off and be done with him?

I mean, why trouble with a utopia at all? Who cares?

Who cares about Man, in such a case?

Skinner would be sure to argue, very reasonably, that the worth of Man is in no way reduced by improving him. If anything, his worth is increased. How should he be more valuable when he's miserable and poorly adapted? Surely his faults are not what make him divine. Skinner would say this, and all the logic in the world would be on his side... yet the very devil if I don't still think he's wrong.

(Skinner would classify my reaction as some sort of neurosis, I've no doubt—one of the unfortunate side effects of growing up in a world where one is taught to cherish pain, because the alternative is to succumb to it. Well, very well: I'll keep my neurosis, Skinner, and you may keep your utopia. Being a behaviorist of course means knowing exactly how every human being ought to be...)

But in any case, I have one objection that concerns both Huxley's and Skinner's utopias, and it is simply this: I really don't believe Man is capable of existing without conflict.

If we're going to deal with this scientifically, then it isn't difficult to show that there are merits and even advantages to negative reinforcement and the use of fear and force. Evolution did not occur by everyone getting along happily together. Skinner baldly dismisses history and says that its variables are too many to prove anything, but even he agrees that competitive behavior was necessary to Man in order for him to attain his present intellectual (and other) abilities. For some reason he believes the time has come, however, for this kind of evolution to cease; he thinks that in order to evolve henceforth, men must cooperate completely, stop competing, learn to love everyone equally, and never again seek praise or distribute blame.

But survival of the fittest is one of the most fundamental principles of evolution, and the only thing that causes men to strive at all is their competitive nature, that instinct that knows that to fail is to die. Shall we then breed competition out of Man? Skinner asserts that a well-adjusted and well-engineered man works just as well or better without the ambition to conquer anyone. I think he is mistaken.

I can't prove it, but for that matter, neither could he. And if Mustafa Mond is right about philosophers -- that their whole enterprise consists of inventing bad reasons for the things they already believe for other bad reasons... still, then, where is the man so impartial that he can be sure his own reasons are not just as bad as the next fellow's?

Anyway. I was going to try to write some kind of actual conclusion for this ramble, but as usual it's quite long enough without that, so...

Agh.

2009-03-03T21:22:59Z

I notice that today's "Writer's Block" thingy asks what five books one would bring along to a desert island. I'm going to use this question to distract me from the fact that the house smells like fucking cat spray, and the much more infuriating fact that the reason it smells like cat spray is because the Demon broke into the pony room (he has a knack for opening doors, EVEN WHEN THEY HAVE BEEN JAMMED SHUT WITH A STOOL) and sprayed, for no reason, in spite of being neutered, on the one pony card that my sister and I still have from when we were kids. (We had about a hundred different ones as kids. We managed to save only this one. THANK YOU, Demon, for proving once again the aptness of your epithet.)

Ahem. Anyway. Books.

I'm going to assume that my exile to this desert island is permanent, so that I'd better take along books I already know I like, and not books I've simply been meaning to read but might not want to spend the rest of my solitary life with. Realistically, I would want some bloody enormous books -- probably the Complete Works of Shakespeare, Complete Works of Melville, Hugo, Marquez... that sort of thing. And probably The Bible, since whether one believes a word of it or not, it certainly contains enough material to keep one occupied for several lifetimes.

But assuming I have to actually pick five individual works, and not collections of books or stories -- I'll take Moby Dick, One Hundred Years of Solitude, The Hunchback of Notre-Dame, The Idiot, and Les Miserables. (Er. Except, again, realistically, I'd probably replace the latter two with Lord of the Rings and The Chronicles of Amber, because I'm not actually sure how much I'd care about Dostoevsky's philosophizing, or the socio-political climate of post-revolution France, if I were stuck with them on an island. Whereas quests and heirs and ancient kingdoms will always have some sort of Jungian appeal.)

God, what a smug little creep.

_grayswandir_ @ 2009-02-13T21:41:00

2009-02-14T05:25:11Z

I've been failing tremendously at keeping up with LJ for the past couple of weeks, but I finally had the chance to skim back through my friends-list today, and I think I'm caught up on everything now. Whew!

Anyway, two things. First, I'm switching my journal to Friends Only, not for any dramatic, immediate reason, but because it just seems like the prudent thing to do, since I'm aiming for a career teaching high school. Better to hide the slash sooner than later, right? ;) I'm leaving most of my book-related posts public, though. And some of the My Little Pony ones, too.

Second... not that most people will care, but just so you know, if you're using Twitter exclusively instead of making actual LJ posts these days, then I've filtered you off of my friends list. I don't like using filters, since it seems rude to have someone on your friends list but not actually read their posts... but I'm not going to read Twitter imports. If you want to defriend me, it's okay.

Oh! And third, galarix, I got your card! :D Thank you!

Anyway, hopefully I'll have time for a more substantial post next week.

East of Eden

2009-02-01T21:08:10Z

People recommend books to me. I read other books. Fail? Yes, sort of fail. But not entirely fail, since at least I can cross something off my reading list...

Anyway, this time the book is Steinbeck's East of Eden. I think I started reading it ten years ago. I made it through the first three hundred pages or so, and then gave it up, bored to death of both the plot and the characters, and thinking that everything about it felt too contrived -- far too contrived for Steinbeck, especially. I felt like he was stepping out of his league.

I don't know if it's just because my expectations have changed, or whether the second half of the book was really so much better than the first half (it did get better as it progressed, even within the second half), but having finished it, I can say that I underestimated Steinbeck, and that although East of Eden could probably have been better, it was very good. It did what it was meant to do.

Steinbeck will never be one of my favorite authors. There's something about him that's so whole and simple, almost Taoist, and it's beautiful, but I'm just too damned analytical for it. Everything about Steinbeck's writing puts me in mind of open farm fields and old corduroy and dirt and sweat, and in a way he puts me in mind of the insignificance of men, because he makes their equality so plain. Everyone is just the same. He cuts straight to the heart of philosophy, leaving aside all the noise of proof and argument, and it makes him look a little bit credulous, but also... something else. Genuine, unpretentious. It's like he's got nothing to gain by convincing you. Like he doesn't care whether you believe him or not. He's just talking—just telling you how he sees it, and if you choose to listen, you're welcome to hear everything.

What struck me as I finished reading East of Eden is that the bare and open simplicity of Steinbeck won me over far more readily than did all of Tolstoy's careful rhetoric. Tolstoy was hellbent on making a point, and he turned every tool of his art to the purpose, but for just that reason I found myself meeting him with resistance, arguing with him rather than just listening to him. Steinbeck you can listen to. I don't know whether or not I agree with him, but it doesn't matter; you don't have to agree with Steinbeck any more than you have to agree with the smell of cornfields after a rain. And what he says is true even if it isn't true, the way myths are true, and the way the wet cornfields are true—because what they mean isn't one thing.

Steinbeck will never be one of my favorite authors, and I'm a bit sorry about that. I think I'm more sorry that I'll never want to write like Steinbeck than that I never will write like Steinbeck. There's something there that I'm missing; I almost think it's that Steinbeck is more human than I have the capacity to be. I don't know if that makes sense. It's just -- not to have an agenda: to write where the act of writing is as pure and unintentional as the act of being—that's what Steinbeck feels like.

I mean, he doesn't, from line to line, or from page to page. There were plenty of pages that made me wonder why I was reading at all. Some of it was contrived, and some of it was just plain out of step. But you see, that's the very thing. Tolstoy was impeccable. I couldn't fault him anywhere. But Steinbeck has something else. He's just human and it's enough for him. The dirt and the sky and the brown hands flicking cigarette ash are enough for him.

If we were only content to be human, I guess we wouldn't need God. Or maybe some people call that finding God. I don't even know. It's probably the same thing.

Okay, but for real this time.

2009-01-18T03:18:21Z

Last post on this subject for a while. I promise.

I said yesterday that Tolstoy was a mediocre philosopher. He is. I also said he was a good writer. That was an understatement. In technical terms, he's one of the best writers I've ever read. He captures characters, times, places, events, emotions, revelations, and pretty much everything else he undertakes to write about, in the most vivid and eloquent terms. For clarity of expression (excluding his philosophical arguments), I can't think of a single author I've ever read who stands above him. I'm not sure I can think of any who equal him.

He's not poetical and he's not abstract, which could be seen as good or bad. There's not much to interpret in his writing; he makes everything straightforward, describes the characters, their thoughts, their personalities, their motives, in terms so precise and thorough as to leave little to the imagination. Hugo and Dickens both took a similar approach to their characters, but Hugo was more sentimental, Dickens more superficial. Technically, one could say that Tolstoy surpasses them both.

Surprisingly, he's also less long-winded than either of them. He takes up a lot of pages writing about things that could just as easily have been left out -- but he never belabors a point (except determinism!). He doesn't get carried away by his metaphors, or waste time showing off his cleverness in needless but amusing phrases; he doesn't trim his language with frills of any kind, or wander off onto tangential subjects.

Ultimately, I was annoyed by him not because his book wasn't brilliant, but because it felt as though he had written the whole thing, a 1400-page epic, as a mere preface to his fifty-page thesis-epilogue on determinism and God. (Rand in Atlas Shrugged, at least, was clever enough to put her 60-page thesis in the middle of a chapter, and in the mouth of one of her characters.)

But even if it weren't for the last fifty pages, I feel there's something missing in Tolstoy's writing.

I can't put my finger on what it is. What can he have missed? He managed everything impeccably. He captured women as well as men, young as well as old, and a dozen or more different types of each, all with astonishing realism. What can have possibly been missing?

Maybe it's just that there was nothing to hold it all together -- nothing except a fifty-page thesis on determinism and God. Maybe it's that ultimately the book wasn't about the physical or spiritual journeys of man, or his nature, or his struggles with morality or salvation or death or love or any of the thousand items touched on briefly throughout the book... it wasn't about any of those things. Just: que sera, sera. Plain, hard, disinterested intellectualism, as the theme for all the lives and triumphs and defeats -- futility, and not even a tragic futility, just a scientific, statistical futility.

Tolstoy captured the many and varied types of humanity better than any other author I've encountered, and yet it feels there was something nearly inhuman about the book, in the end. Henry James once said, in criticism of Charles Dickens, that to be a great novelist, one "must know man as well as men." Maybe that's what Tolstoy is missing, too. He has a wonderful grasp of men, of a depth and breadth to put even Dickens to shame. But as for man... I think that may have been the one essential character he left out.

I don't know what I'll be reading next. The reason it occurred to me how far I'd underestimated Tolstoy is because I've been trying to start on some other book, but nothing I pick up comes anywhere close to Tolstoy's eloquence, and I find myself doing more criticising than reading. So far, King Lear is the only thing I've tried that I haven't been able to find fault with. ...So much for lighter reading. :P

I made this post because the combination of circumstances dictated that I would.

2009-01-17T04:25:34Z

Well, I've finally finished reading War and Peace. It turned out to be, at bottom, a 1400-page treatise on determinism. I feel it only fair to warn those of you who may be interested in reading it. The characters are good, the writing is good, it's easy to read, and there are some interesting ideas along the way. But ultimately, the point is that free will exists only as a kind of necessary unknown factor without which we could not call ourselves human, but has no meaning; ultimately the point is that everything done by anybody was predestined by God from the dawn of time (or rather outside of time), and no one could ever have acted any differently than they did. Especially not Napoleon, which is what makes him the most odious of all. Apparently.

I will also add, though of course this is entirely my own opinion, that Tolstoy is a thoroughly mediocre philosopher. His arguments, when they aren't the same ones that have been advanced for centuries, are almost irrelevant; his metaphors are mostly complete nonsense; and even when he makes a valid point, he often does so by proofs which are completely inscrutable. Dostoevsky made a better argument for determinism in five or ten pages of Notes From Underground -- and Dostoevsky didn't even believe in it.

I think it may be time for some lighter reading.

book list (in progress)

2009-01-13T01:29:13Z

A couple of people on my f-list have now made lists of books to read in 2009 (or, more realistically, let's just say in the near future). This is in no way a complete list of books I need to read, but I'll keep adding to it as people recommend things. (If you've recommended something and I've forgotten to put it on the list, remind me! Or if you have anything else to add, of course. :)

BOOKS TO READ

Vaguely organized according to... genre, or something.

(+ means I've already started the book, or, in some cases, half finished it...)

The Odyssey
The Iliad +
The Aeneid +
1001 Arabian Nights +
The Canterbury Tales +
The Golden Ass +
Don Quixote +

Ulysses +
The Red and the Black +
Remembrance of Things Past +
For Whom the Bell Tolls +
A Light in August
Absalom! Absalom!
The Demons
The Autumn of the Patriarch
Love in the Time of Cholera
Anthem
The Gulag Archipelago
The Jungle
The Three Musketeers
The Count of Monte Cristo
The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
Sons and Lovers

Perfume (Patrick Süßkind)
Brother of Sleep (Robert Schneider)
The Sandman (E. T. A. Hoffman)
Peter Schlemiel (Adalbert Von Chamisso)
Tin Drum (Günther Grass)
The Magic Mountain (Thomas Mann)
Death in Venice (Thomas Mann)
The 13 1/2 Lives of Capt. Blue Bear (Walter Moers)
Berlin. Alexanderplatz (Alfred Döblin)

Dubliners
The Case Book of Sherlock Holmes
Stories of Your Life and Others (Ted Chiang)
The Things They Carried (O'Brien)
Selected Stories (Alice Munro)
In Our Time (Hemingway)
Where I'm Calling From (Raymond Carver)
After the Plague (T. C. Boyle)
(J.D. Salinger)
(O. Henry)

Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell
Temeraire
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
American Gods
Lathe of Heaven (Ursula K. Le Guin)
The Left Hand of Darkness (Ursula K. Le Guin)
The Winter Prince (Elizabeth Wein)

The Once and Future King
The Amber Spyglass
The Subtle Knife
A Wrinkle in Time

Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea
Journey to the Center of the Earth

Copenhagen
Jumpers
The Coast of Utopia
Hapgood
Enter a Free Man
(More Shakespeare)
(Shaw) Can somebody recommend some Shaw?

The Screwtape Letters
Till We Have Faces

(More Nietzsche)
Wellington: The Iron Duke +
Meditations +
The Republic

I could probably do with some recommendations for short story collections (about which I know almost nothing, since I rarely read short stories, but probably should start).

pony photos: Bubbles' Antiques

2009-01-09T14:02:57Z

Once again, I come with pony photos. :) This time we took pictures of our pony antique store. You can check out the page at our website by clicking here.

Oh look, another post about fiction.

2009-01-01T21:39:53Z

And welcome to 2009! *confetti*

While waiting around last night for the changing of the year, I decided to try out Borges, beginning with "The Immortal," which agguss recommended to me ages ago. I can see that Borges will very probably be going down on my favorite authors list. I'm not sure how to comment on him, however; his writing is so succinct and complete, there's nothing I could possibly add to it, and if I tried to quote all the most interesting lines in "The Immortal" I suppose I'd wind up quoting half of the story. But mainly I suppose I'd just have to quote the entire paragraph which begins, "There is nothing very remarkable about being immortal," which discusses how obvious it is that Christians, Muslims, and Jews do not really believe in immortality, and which shows how an immortal man deserves everything that befalls him, both good and evil -- something I've been thinking about for a long time, actually. "Over an infinitely long span of time, all things happen to all men." And: "Like Cornelius Agrippa, I am god, hero, philosopher, demon, and world -- which is a long-winded way of saying that I am not."

This very idea is one of the reasons I've always considered the possibility of eternal life, in some celestial afterworld, preposterous: in an infinite timeframe, all events lose their significance, and all the multitude of spirits might as well be one spirit, or indeed nothing at all. At times I've thought the only conceivable relationship between an omniscient god and the mass of humanity would be that such a god was literally every man: that to be immortal would be, almost by definition, to be every man. There seems no sense in the existence of more than one immortal; it's enough for just one man to be every man, is it not? But anyway, even this idea is absurd, since after all Solomon was right three thousand years ago, that there was nothing new under the sun: so why should anyone, immortal or otherwise, have to keep living the various lives of men over and over, the same lives, the same stories?

It is, as Borges says, the mortality of men that gives them significance and makes them sympathetic: "their ghostliness is touching; any act they perform may be their last; there is no face that is not on the verge of blurring and fading away like the faces in a dream. Everything in the world of mortals has the value of the irrecoverable and contingent." He really captured here the essence of the beauty and the necessity of mortality, and undoubtedly did it better than I ever will, although it's one of the topics I've always been most interested in expressing.

I'm also a bit over 600 pages into War and Peace now, and rather amused that Nikolei only really fell in love with Sonya after seeing her in boys' clothes and mustaches, and Sonya only really opened up to Nikolei after seeing him in a crinoline dress. Nineteenth century cross-dressing FTW! -- definitely not something I was expecting from this book. ;) But now I'm rather worried that horrible things are going to start happening to Prince Andrei at any moment (again), since it's far too early in the book for Tolstoy to simply marry him off happily to Natasha. Which is unfortunate, since Andrei/Natasha is almost the first heterosexual, fictional relationship I've ever really liked. Though I suppose I'll only like them all the more after horrible things happen to them. Such is the way of literature.

And those appear to be my beginning-of-the-year thoughts. New year, same pointless ramblings!

books and... er, books

2008-12-28T18:44:46Z

Well! Book-buying went fairly well, and I still have some money left over. I got The Canterbury Tales, with the original text side by side with a translation, for $6 (I've read a number of excerpts from the book before, but never the whole thing). I got A Game of Thrones for $4 and Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell for $6. The (complete) Collected Works of Borges was $20, but even that was pretty damn good, I thought. I mean, complete works, you know.

Barnes & Noble had a ton of stuff on sale, including a lot of really beautiful art books, but I restrained myself and didn't buy them. They also had a "Buy 2 Get 1 Free" thing for classics, at $5 each -- but I already have most of the classics they were offering! I may go back anyway, though, because their copy of The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde was very nice. And I need a new copy of Candide, because the translation I've got is so bad that it keeps making me think I dislike Voltaire.

I was a little surprised by how many books they didn't have, though. Nothing by Tom Stoppard except the plays I've already got, for instance. Copenhagen was also nowhere to be found. And each store I visited had at most two books on Napoleon, which really surprised me since, if I recall, Napoleon is the second most extensively biographized man in the world -- the first being Jesus. No biographies of Wellington at all, though I did find (and buy) a book about Napoleon and Wellington, which is at least something.

(I also didn't find anything by C.S. Lewis, but it now occurs to me that that's probably because I was looking for him in Fiction and Literature rather than Children's...)

I also finally signed up for next semester's classes. This was a bit of an ordeal, since there is no class whatsoever that I can take just now that will actually apply to my major. The reason is this: I'm already done taking everything I need except for the (many!) Physics and Education classes. I have to take Calculus before I can take any Physics classes at all, and I have to take several Physics classes before they'll let me into the Education program to take the upper level classes there. (And I haven't even taken Precalculus yet!)

But I have to take at least three courses, at ~$1000 each, or I won't be a "full-time student," which will mean I won't get my grants and loans. So.

I've signed up for Precalculus, of course. I was going to retake Russian 202, but then I was told that it wouldn't count toward my full-time status, because I've already taken it. So instead I'm taking German 101, which should be pretty easy, since I already understand quite a bit of German; I just can't speak/write it grammatically. And I'm taking Great Russian Novelists of the 19th Century. XD It'll be my first 300-level class, but I don't expect it to be too difficult, since of all the authors listed in the course description, Turgenev is the only one I don't at least know something about already. (If I recall, it was my inability to choose between a plethora of Turgenev translations that finally made up my mind to start learning Russian, several years ago. axmxz was right: I should have just picked a translation. ;)

I also discovered that they offer a class on Milton! :D I wasn't able to sign up for it, because you have to take English Literature Before 1800 first. And I couldn't sign up for that because they only offer it in the fall. Maybe next spring, though. :)

Every time I realize how excited I am about taking literature classes, I start wondering if I'm an idiot for going after a Physics degree instead of something in the arts. There are so many wonderful things I could major in. How the hell do people choose just one thing to do with a lifetime?

books and movies

2008-12-27T19:22:37Z

Items:

1) The Spirit has reminded me why I never go to the theater. Ten dollars for that?

Neil Gaiman posits that The Spirit fails because it strays too far from the original comics Will Eisner wrote. But I've never read anything by Eisner, and it failed for me, too. One thing it definitely suffers from is completely misleading advertising (which Gaiman also talked about, but in relation to Coraline, a few days ago). The previews made The Spirit out to be dramatic but serious and at least a little bit epic. The actual film is more like a mediocre surrealist comedy -- something I would never pay theater prices to see.

It was funny in places, but not half as clever as it obviously believed it was. ("The shiny thing to end all shiny things"? Is this, like, a Mel Brooks superhero film, or what? 'Cause, um, you kind of can't do both. The dramatic hero-silhouetted-against-a-blood-red-sky scenes do not mesh well with the LOL HITLER AND DENTISTRY ARE HILARIOUS scenes.) And most of the narration just came off like bad internal-monologue fanfic. (Miller, I know you are a better writer than this. WTF happened?)

I mean, Samuel L. Jackson and the dude who played Spirit both did a pretty damn good job, considering the script they had to work with, but they couldn't save the film. Overkill on special effects, serious overkill on slapstick, and... no plot at all? What can you even do with that?

2) I'm a bit over 300 pages into War and Peace. I was worried that it would be slow reading, and 1400 pages of it, at that -- but it's actually surprisingly fast-paced; more so than a lot of other authors of the period, anyway. My only difficulty with the book so far is in keeping track of its superabundance of characters. Russian authors seem to always bloody do this, introducing dozens of characters at a time, and then happily referring to each one variously by his surname, given name and patronymic, numerous diminutives and nicknames (some French, in this case), and his titles, and expecting the reader to remember to whom they all apply!

So Andrei, for instance, is also "Andrushka," "Andrei Nikolaevich," "the prince," and "Bolkonsky." Pierre is "Pyotr" and "Petya" and "Count Bezuhov" and "the count." And since nearly every character in the book is either a count or a prince (or a countess or a princess), things get a little confusing.

Literally, Tolstoy had introduced fully twenty-three characters within the firsty fifty pages of the book. I think he must be up to forty or fifty by now. And their relationships are all so intertangled, and getting worse by the moment with marriages and inheritances and so forth... I'll be lucky to keep track of half of them by the time the book is over.

Though, then again, I managed all right with One Hundred Years of Solitude, and all Marquez's characters had the same names. So we'll see.

Oddly, War and Peace is also having the unexpected side-effect of making me really excited about Napoleon. For the first few pages, I thought, "How interesting... I think this will be the first book I've ever read to take an unfavorable view of Napoleon." But no, of course not -- half the characters are turning out to be in love with Napoleon! They want to defeat him, sure, but they're still in love with him. Apparently the charms of the Emperor are simply irresistible.

And somehow, in spite of being aware that what I'm reading is 140-year-old fiction about a war that took place fully two centuries ago, I still find myself gripping the pages whenever someone starts talking about Napoleon -- and especially when, for brief moments, he actually appears in the narrative. "OH MY GOD IT'S NAPOLEON LOOK HE'S RIGHT THERE. ON THIS VERY PAGE." Yeah.

It's rather amazing to step back and realize that it's all just words on a page. While I was reading, I stopped for a moment just to look at Napoleon's name: eight letters, each one alone significant of nothing but a syllable of sound -- and yet, together, the shape of them, Napoleon, significant of so many images and events and ideas. It is really wonderful how the brain can connect these symbols so inseparably with their meanings, so that the actual shape of the letters spelled out in that particular order really do seem to represent and even describe the man, and conjure up images of tricolor banners and sashes, blue uniforms with white breeches, tricorns and riding boots, a white hand thrust between the undone buttons of a general's coat. If you look long enough at it, Napoloen in black print, the name dissolves into empty symbols, the disordered pieces of an alphabet. But at a glance, one really does seem to read a whole era in that word.

Either that, or I am just a bit insane and obsessive. Which is... not entirely out of the question.

(ETA: And now we've reached the point where Andrei is realizing the relative pettiness of Napoleon, after all. Which, yes, that also. In fact there are many pettier things about Napoleon than those Andrei knows; he was very, very fallibly human, after all, even if the public did not see much of it. But apparently for Tolstoy's purposes it still takes comparing him against the infinite, against death, against God and eternity and the whole expanse of the heavens, to diminish Napoleon. Interestingly, it works, stylistically... but I'm not sure that, from an objective standpoint, it makes any difference.)

3) I guess this post would be the place to tell me what books I should buy with my gift cards. ;) Of course, I've already got a list; foremost among the books I'm planning to buy are Copenhagen, A Song of Ice and Fire (at least the first book), Stoppard's Jumpers and The Coast of Utopia, The Screwtape Letters... something by Jorge Luis Borges, if I can bloody find anything... possibly The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde... maybe Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell? I've heard mixed reviews of that one... But anyway, I'm shopping at Bookman's, where everything is used and cheap, so if I have any money left over, I'll want to know what I should spend it on. And it's always nice to have options! :)

End of the year: more about books.

2008-12-18T15:09:56Z

At long last, finals are over. I have no idea how I did on my College Algebra final, and luckily I don't have to care, because unless I utterly failed it, I should still get a B in the class. And if I did utterly fail it -- I'll still get a C.

So. It's time once again for my embarrassingly short list-of-books-I-read-this year. I'm still a hell of a long way from "read your height in books," but I did better than last year, anyway. (And as usual, I'm not including stories and plays from collections -- just whole novels.)

Here, then, are the books, complete with commentary of great prolixity and spoileriness.

Toilers of the Sea by Victor Hugo

I really enjoyed this book; it was well written, well researched, vivid and interesting, and the plot, for Hugo, was less than usually ridiculous, less convoluted with improbable Dickensian twists. Yet overall it lacked something—that something that would have made it literature. And because Hugo is too much a man of meanings and ideas and allusions to ever stoop to compose mere fiction, it's hard to know what to do with him here.

The characters had a bit of a recycled feel, though I didn't mind that so much. Déruchette was Cosette, except even more delicate and fluttering. Caudray was a kind of hybrid: the looks of Enjolras, the passion of Marius, the philosophical demeanor of Combeferre, and the saintliness of Charles François Bienvenu Myriel—if you can imagine. And Gilliatt was a young, and slightly oblivious, Valjean.

Lethierry was new, at least: ambitious, enterprising, careless of public opinion and popular superstition, and even religion—as skeptical and rude as Grantaire, as headstrong as Bahorel or Courfeyrac, yet as harmless and well-intentioned as Valjean. I liked Lethierry. And Clubin, although a rather implausible villain, was original and surprising.

I liked Gilliatt too, but as with Valjean, I find myself liking and respecting him without being much interested in him. Maybe it's the fault of the superabundance of pages devoted to both of them, so that there seems nothing left to be said. Maybe it's the infallibility of their natures, eternally self-sacrificing, godly though irreligious, inculpable in every action, physically and emotionally unconquerable except by one fatal blow: the loss of their Cosettes. They really do have everything in common—both besting adversity by a kind of native genius, surprising physical ability, and much perseverance. Valjean carrying the stigma of his past, a crime and twenty years punishment; Gilliatt carrying the stigma of his mysterious parentage, the bedeviled home in which he was raised, and his purported sorcery.

There is also something of Quasimodo in Gilliatt, though—at least in relation to the girl. He was not a monster, but evidently he appeared one to her, brutish with his big rough hands, his tanned and windburned features. The birdlike girl flits between their fingers, Quasimodo, Valjean, Gilliatt, and they all let her go.

Ah, Hugo, you charming redundant man.

Still, there was just something a bit too saintly about Gilliatt, something too self-abnegating and divine. Quasimodo was saintly in some ways, but he was also capable of violence and murder. Valjean, meanwhile, was self-denying almost to the point of gluttony; he was not so much a saint as a man desperate and half mad with guilt, struggling at every moment to make restitution for ancient crimes, again and again. Gilliatt, though, is simply an absurdly good man. Not unbelievable, but simply... uninteresting.

Anyway, it was a good book, and a part of me even wants to read it again. Hugo's scathingly blithe sarcasm on matters of religious persecution, on churchgoing, on superstition, will never cease to amuse me; and the section about Gilliatt on the Douvres, battling the rocks and the sea for a claim on the wrecked ship, rigging pulleys and living on raw shellfish, was epic enough to have belonged to a Les Misérables. The plot and the resolution just didn't quite live up to it.

Incidentally, I read Toilers of the Sea back in January, just after finishing Moby Dick. I had thought, while reading the latter, that Melville strongly reminded me of Hugo—but then reading them back to back, I was able to see how very different they were, after all. Oddly—considering how certain I am of Melville's homosexuality—I can't help thinking that Hugo is rather the more feminine of the two. His style isn't exactly flowery, but it lacks the sort of... Socratic robustness one finds in Melville. If you see what I mean.

In Hugo's humor, there is always a vein of punny wit or slightly haughty satire: a touch of Voltaire, Diderot. Melville is bawdier, rougher, and I'm not sure how to explain it, because line by line, the man is as eloquent as any ever who spoke in the English tongue: "Yonder, by the ever-brimming goblet's rim, the warm waves blush like wine. The gold brow plumbs the blue. The diver sun—slow dived from noon—, goes down; my soul mounts up! she wearies with her endless climb. Is, then, the crown too heavy that I wear? this Iron Crown of Lombardy. Yet is it bright with many a gem; I, the wearer, see not its far flashings; but darkly feel that I wear that, that dazzlingly confounds."

Melville's lines are eloquent and metered with an almost Shakespearean cadence, and yet there is that underlying power in them, that striking succinctness—that Germanic abruptness, like Hopkins in prose. He's eloquent, but he never wastes your time with frills. He's as trim and streamlined as a ship, spare as a sailor; there is just nothing superfluous about him.

Hugo has more a tendency to get swept up in a topic, and... well, I mean, he's not Dickens, he's not bloody Hawthorne; he keeps mostly to his point. It's just that his point tends to get rather convoluted and detailed, and sprinkled with religion and philosophy and sarcasm and poignancy. It's good; I don't mean anything against Hugo. Heavens know I love Hugo. I just mean that he's different.

Hugo's style is a sweep: Melville's is a thrust. They both love aesthetics as well as utility, but there's something simply irreducible about Melville. He writes in prime numbers. Hugo wedges his primes into formulas, and they're interesting formulas—they sweep. But Melville just... well, it's as he said himself. Moby Dick is a novel that may as well be written in engravers' capitals, front to back. There's this massive centrality to it. Places and characters and philosophies, race and religion, the whole gamut of literary topics—but it always comes back to the whale.

Er. Speaking of which. /digression

Brief Lives by Neil Gaiman

I really thought I had read all the Sandman comics back when I was in high school, but apparently I was wrong! hamsterwoman made a post about this one, and it didn't sound familiar, even though I knew I owned a copy of it. So I went and read it, and lo -- it was all new! How I skipped it before I've no idea, but it was really, really fun to find an entire book of Sandman canon that I'd never read before.

And instead of linking to my previous comments on the book, I'll just repost them, since they're short: I liked Destruction and pitied Despair, and was perpetually entertained by Delirium. I loved Merv. Destiny was as painfully immutable as ever, and remains my second-favorite among the Endless. And Dream, as always, was magnificent -- all the more so for his pettiness and recurring bouts of impatience, aggravation, and outright rudeness. I giggled every time he said, "Stop that." And rather melted every time he tried to apologize, but was a little too proud to quite do it properly. And at the end, with Orpheus... and talking to the blood in the basin... ay.

Frankenstein by Mary Shelley

You know, I actually kind of liked this book, in spite of its being utterly ridiculous. It reminds me, in almost every way, of Wordsworth -- whom I also somehow sort of like, in spite of his being utterly, tediously ridiculous. There's something just charmingly adolescent about it. And in places it is really pretty damn hilarious -- even if that's not at all what Shelley intended.

Mostly irrelevant comments are here and here.

Coraline by Neil Gaiman

Not much to say about this one. It was very Neil Gaiman, and for that reason it amused me in a kind of nostalgically familiar way, but there didn't seem to be much point to it. For a children's book, it was fairly dark; but that in itself is not sufficient to recommend it. I guess... I don't like to talk about Neil Gaiman without praising him, because I do adore him, but in justice I can't praise him for Coraline. It was cute in places, creepy in places; it could be likened to any number of myths or fairy tales or other children's stories—but it doesn't surpass them. It doesn't explode them or turn them back round on themselves, or reveal in them some startling new aspect—it's just the same transdimensional children's story, only in Gaiman's voice instead of someone else's.

Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell

I was very surprised by how much I liked this book. It was fast-paced and engaging, so that I never wanted to put it down, and always wanted to pick it back up. Winston was a believable and sympathetic character, flawed in appropriate ways; Julia was also believable, if not at all likeable; I even somehow was drawn to O'Brien, the bastard, all the way up to the end. As for the ideas, some of them were trite—but in the context of the novel they didn't seem so.

The story demanded a great deal of suspended disbelief, however; and part of the trouble seemed to be that the characters were aware of this. Winston himself knew, though he couldn't articulate why, that such a distopia simply could not exist. Who would establish it, and to what purpose? There is no benefit in it for anyone, except the disembodied idea of Big Brother—maybe. Everyone is downtrodden, deprived, distrusted, threatened. Not just the lower classes, but everyone. How could such a system get on?

Are people really more docile when they're deprived? It seems to me that continually appeasing people—never giving them too much, but also never giving them too little—is a better system. It ensures that they depend on you. They may even feel indebted to you. That is the great advantage of the Church: God may commit every crime conceivable, but He is still Providence, for all that. Everything that comes to man comes from Him. What comes from Big Brother? An ounce of chocolate? It's not enough.

Complacency is much more dangerous to man's ambition than deprivation is. Deprive a man, and you give him a reason to rebel: what has he to lose by rebelling? Nothing. And he has everything to gain. But give a man all that he needs, and even enough surplus to keep him entertained—and he will never pick himself up from his sofa to rebel against you. He may even hate you, somehow—but it will only be a lazy, torpid hate; why should he act on it? He has so much to lose, and nothing to gain.

If the Party had been clever enough to have kept its people happy—even with all the same deceptions, the eradication of the past, the manipulation of truths, the destruction of intellectualism—it could perhaps have given its people no freedoms, made them absolute slaves, but kept them happy enough never to care to rebel. (I hear B.F. Skinner writes about just such a distopia—or utopia, perhaps—in Walden Two, of which I can't seem to find a copy.) But as for this system, I can't help agreeing with Winston, irrational and flailing though he may be: "I don't care. Somehow you will fail. Something will defeat you. Life will defeat you."

There are other problems, such as why Winston was left to wander around for seven years before the Party decided to crush him; why he was permitted to fornicate with Julia, to rent the room, to join the supposed Brotherhood. There's the question of why "the book" even exists, why O'Brien wrote it, and why Winston was given it to read, when the whole point was to prevent him from believing a word of it. The amount of doublethink entailed in writing a book about what impossible nonsense doublethink is... it's perfectly inconceivable.

But anyway, I can forgive Orwell all these inconsistencies, because for the life of me I can't think of a better way to have expressed what he wanted to express, and his meanings came through crystal clear. His plot was far from bulletproof—but it was all that was needed to bring up the points he had in mind, about the past being real or unreal, about man as the measure of all things, about the relativity and inconsistency of truth. His success was in depicting a terrible and yet very conceivable world, of synethetics and hypocrisies, of the terror of missteps and the suicidal will to rebel. Emotions captured with dangerous, shocking, and demoralizing realism: the hate whose object can be flipped on a whim; the love that is only an idea, a fact, and not a heartfelt emotion; the betrayal that cannot be undone, and only wishes it had been insincere. The frailty of the human form as the foremost obstacle to ambition, because some little ailment is sufficient to reduce one's thoughts to static. And that terrible juxtaposition of metaphor and literalism, "the place where there is no darkness." God, that. No darkness. I will make you perfect. Yes—very nicely done, indeed.

The Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick

A reread, because I had forgotten most of it. I've loved this book both times I've read it, and yet somehow it is extremely unmemorable. I remember the ideas, but not the actual story, the characters, the dialogue. There's something somehow blurred about it, so that I feel less as if I had read a story, and more as if a weight of philosophical questions had simply... descended on me.

Yeah, so. For even more incoherent and meandering comments, there's a post here.

I must say, I'm still somewhat baffled by the ending. The only thing I can make of it is that maybe Dick was implying that Japan and Germany really won the war—just as, in the book, the man in the high castle is unwittingly implying that Japan and Germany really lost the war. I'm far from sure about this, however.

V for Vendetta by Alan Moore

Comments in this post. I'm still ambivalent, because the book was so different from the movie that I almost can't compare them... and yet so like the movie that I can't not compare them. And both are wonderful, sometimes for the same and sometimes for different reasons -- each one succeeds in a different way, and each one is, in some other ways, just a little inferior to the other. Mainly, I just wish the art and, especially, the coloring had been better in the book. That would have made a great deal of difference, I think.

Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand

I said when I finished reading it that maybe someday I would have the energy to write a gigantic post about my reaction to Atlas Shrugged. I guess this will have to be that post.

I have never been so torn about a work of fiction as I was while reading this one. There were moments when I had the utmost respect for Rand, for the bold, unflinching integrity of her moral code, the unassailable Darwinian rightness of it—and other times when I very nearly flung the book across the room in disgust with her, and could not imagine forgiving her for her utter callous arrogance, her willful wrongness. From one page to another, I adored her or I hated her. It was certainly an odd experience.

The trouble, I see now, is that her position is not one that can be espoused only halfway—any more than its alternative can be espoused only halfway. Either you believe that justice is right, and that men should be paid what they earn, no more and no less, and credited where it is their due, and never subjugated by guilt or fear—or else you believe that mercy is right, and that men should be treated charitably in spite of their failings and regardless of their successes... and that the great have a duty to provide for the small, because we are all human, and all in this together.

And the more I think about it, the more I find myself on Rand's side. I will never go as far as she does, to call charity a plague borne of guilt, or denounce those who would hold up mercy as a virtue. But I do feel, like Rand and like Nietzsche, that a people which fosters the weak will grow weaker, and fall into decline, while a people which desires to evolve and rise to some higher plane—must let those who fail, fail, and give the future over to those who succeed.

The point Rand makes is not that you should never help another man, or never forgive him—but that you should never help him unless he is also willing to help himself, and never forgive him unless he is ready to repair his mistakes. That to need is not the same as to deserve. And that to be happy does not put you in debt to the man who is miserable, or demand your guilt.

In all this, I am with her. It would have been a bit more convincing, I thought, if she had invented a more believable cast of characters, rather than this intellectual, industrial elite made up of dashing, suave, handsome, slender, powerful men with intransigent moral codes and inflexible prides, with unbending courage and boundless capacities for love and joy... if she had not tried literally to write a breed of Übermenschen, of gods. Not that man shouldn't strive for perfection, and of course in order to do so he must identify his ideal, and rise for it; and even if he doesn't make it to the peak, as Rand says, he will at least die with the rays of its glory breaking over him, having risen up. And maybe that's the whole point.

Taken as an allegory, a philosophical abstract, where John Galt and all the rest are meant to represent the ideal—not as men who actually exist, but as men who should exist, whom we should strive to bring into existence by becoming—if that was the point, then yes: I am with her in that. For a while I was annoyed with Rand for having spoken of the ideal as a man who would feel no fear, and no pain—as though we would still be human if we ever rose up that high, and transcended fear and pain. But I think now that what she meant was this: that a man should be willing to suffer for the things he believes in, and that so long as his pain is chosen, not self-destructively but for some honest purpose—so long as his pain contains in it the joy of its own worthiness, of being not a sacrifice but a payment for something greater—then it is not pain. Or at least, it is a higher kind of pain, one we can respect, and do not need to pity.

Another of Rand's points, and one with which I agree wholeheartedly, is that our greatest virtue, as a species, is our capacity for thought: that to think is the fundamental predicate of man. To act is, of course, necessary; but before a man acts he must think, and if he refuses to think, if thinking is too hard for him, then he has renounced his humanity. And whatever may be our innate capacities, it is our duty as men—as humans—to climb for the highest point we can reach, and become the full potential of what we could have been. To make ourselves worthy of the day when we would have met him, John Galt, the idea, the ideal, the living god, and shaken his hand—even though we will never meet him.

Tao Te Ching by Lao Tsu

I don't think I can actually review the Tao Te Ching. That seems a bit petty. But I will say that it is beautiful and simple and profound, and probably untranslatable, each line as compact and faceted as a haiku. I read two different translations side by side, and at times they seemed to say entirely different things; and I've seen that there are yet other translations with other meanings, extracted from the same text. It reminded me very strongly of some books on Native American shamanism that I've read, but more concise. I'm not quite passive enough to be a Taoist myself—but I very much respect the philosophy.

The Stranger by Albert Camus

I kind of have no idea what happened in this book. Our title character is strange, all right—sometimes he comes off almost as an imbecile, or at least autistic or something. He clearly suffers some emotional deficit, yet at his most lucid, he has some fascinating revelations. I guess he reminds me more of Vladimir and Estragon than of anyone else, dimly perceiving and yet very much lost. The Stranger is obviously a postmodern work, and I suppose the whole nihilistic despair of postmodernism is perhaps what's meant by it, but... I really can't tell. If anybody has any thoughts, I'd be curious to hear them.

Big Fish by Daniel Wallace

I probably would have been more impressed with the book if I hadn't already seen the movie, which was good enough that it sort of obviated the need for the book. But the book was good. It was less sensational than the movie, which was for the best; but it had a lot fewer stories, which is one place where I think the movie improved upon it, since after all the stories are the point. The book seemed to take place much more in the present, and the stories were simply little anecdotes to fill the space between the scenes progressing the plot. The movie was much more successful in conveying that the point was not how it ends, but what the story is, along the way.

On the whole, though, I'd say that the book and the movie both do one another justice quite well, and I wouldn't hesitate to recommend either or both of them to anyone, without much discrimination between the two. The impact of the novel is a little more somber, and a little more autobiographical; the impact of the movie is a little blurred by its sensationalism and absurdity... but either way, the message is there. And a lovely message it is, too.

All-Star Batman and Robin the Boy Wonder by Frank Miller

(In addition to lots of other Batman graphic novels, which are reviewed here.)

This, predictably, reminded me very much of Miller's The Dark Knight Returns. Not in substance, exactly, but in the impression it left on me. I like Miller's stories, but I'm not sure I accept them. He writes a Batman, a believable Batman—perhaps the most believable Batman—yet somehow the fellow just doesn't feel like the Batman.

There are things about Miller's Batman that are improvements on most of the other incarnations. For one thing, the guy is seriously fucking crazy. Damn smart, absolutely methodical, dangerously sharp... but also seriously fucking crazy. It's hard to explain how I mean. He's not socially inept: in the role of Bruce Wayne he puts on a very convincing façade of social normalcy. He may not be normal, but he understands it well enough to imitate it. It's something else.

I mean, here is a man who is utterly solitary, who spends every waking moment wearing one mask or another, pretending to be something he isn't, in the name of a crusade that's the explosion of personal vendetta into a full-blown one-man war on crime. Every moment that he's not playing the role of Bruce Wayne, billionaire playboy—and that with unparalleled talent—he's training, exercising, scrutinizing news articles, analyzing evidence, building, inventing, planning. A man like that shouldn't be able to afford to be insane. He's obsessive, overzealous, but also ambitious, intelligent, capable, driven. Meticulous. Yes—even if he does spend his nights dressing up as a bat, finding criminals, and beating them to a bloody, insensible pulp.

Even that isn't quite mad. Very, very illegal, certainly questionable in moral terms—but still it only makes him a vigilante. He's taken the law into his own hands, and dispenses his own justice as he pleases, according to his own rules. A man like that could be a psychopath. Or he could be a revolutionary. When a government cannot police itself, a man will rise to power, impose a law, and dispense his own justice. The difference is that usually, such a man will have a following, a host of chiefs and soldiers and so forth, and his aim will be to govern. Batman is not a political figure. He's more an avenging angel, not writing the laws but simply enforcing them. Personally, and with lots of violence.

And yet it's not this that's so insane, either. It's not good, but it's not insane. Yet there is something very decidedly insane about Miller's Batman.

It's not even the fact that he dresses up as a bat. When you consider—well, hell, when you consider fashion in general, it's only too easy to make a case for the insanity of the entire human species. The immense starched ruffs, the powdered wigs, the voluminous dresses, the bust-enhancing brassieres, and all the strange and myriad piercings and tattoos—what about all that isn't insane? The costumes of the elite are historically eccentric. And egad, how much less sane is the bright target-board color of the Redcoats during the war, functionally speaking, than the masked vigilante stalking dark streets in a sweep of black cloak? He's chosen an emblem, the bat, a primitive symbol to inspire terror, and represent himself as something dark and silent and looming and sudden. Certainly it appears eccentric, but it's really rather genius. A man playing off archetypes, turning men's natural fears to his advantage. That part isn't crazy at all.

But, though I can't pinpoint it, there is still something very wrong with him. And what I'm trying to get around to saying is that Frank Miller does an excellent job of portraying just how freakishly different he is, and has to be, in order to be Batman. He's not incapable of love—but he thinks he is. He has no time for that sort of consideration. He's a crusader, and his time is taken up entirely with calculation and destruction. He is not and cannot be a good man. He is in constant surveillance of and contact with the most despicable examples of humankind, and his business is thrashing and sometimes intentionally torturing them. He does it for the greater good, and the rules he has set down for himself are to insure that he never becomes the abyss into which he is gazing. Not quite. But he is walking on the edge. He was made for dispensing justice—he's a hunter and a punisher. He's not an evil man. But he is not a good man.

Miller seems to be almost the only author to have recognized just how essential this point is to the character of Batman. Everyone else—and I probably would do the same thing myself, even—writes him as a tormented hero who is trying his best to do what's right, and who recognizes the necessity of kicking some ass in the meantime. It's a pretty fantasy, but it just doesn't fly. The guy is dangerous. His world is not the same as our world: his perception is skewed and the thing he has made himself, the persona with which he interacts with the world, is violent and frightening. He has a system of ideals, and perhaps he has considered them with philosophical rigor, or perhaps he has adopted them somewhat arbitrarily because they're the ideals of mankind, universally, and because they appeal to him personally for his own psychologically and emotionally damaged reasons. But either way, the ideals are for him a law, a set of rules, and not his essence. His is not Christ's but Satan's role: not to lead the way to salvation, but to find the damned and inflict the proper punishment.

Anyway, this is sort of beside the point of the actual book in question, which is mostly about Robin being a smart-mouthed little punk who's got a heck of a lot of potential, and Batman being horrible on purpose because he thinks it's necessary, and then realizing that he had the wrong idea, pushed too hard too soon. He's a scary, scary Batman, one who laughs while he sets you on fire, and in some places I think Miller completely missed the mark and made him a genuine monster—but overall, what he did is interesting. His Batman is much more stern and strong and solitary than most of the others I've read, theatrical with very calculated intent, and even though he's crazy and probably very lonely, he's also tough enough to bloody well handle it. He's a man who can't afford weaknesses, can't afford friendships, can't afford to take anything for granted; he's a man who holds all his emotions perpetually at bay, because they have no place in his life or his work. They would only get in his way.

He's not the beautiful, tragic, martyred, desperate Batman that one gets in so many other comics, the one who's so easy to fall in love with. He's more like the real thing, not beautiful but scarred and hardened, not tragic, because that would be an indulgence, not desperate but determined and immovable—a man who is a magnificent idea, a magnificent archetype, an image worthy of legend... but whose reality is brutally day-to-day. There's nothing romantic about it. It's not a life you wish you could live. It's an inhuman sort of life.

Miller doesn't talk about any of this, really, but it's what I got from him. His is almost the first Batman I've read or seen who really feels like a man, like something other than the author projecting an idealized figure. I'm still not sure I accept him. But I do appreciate very much what Miller's done.

Watchmen by Alan Moore

I've said most of this before, but here's another go.

I respect Watchmen much more now that I realize how unique it really was, in its time—and also now that I've stepped back enough to survey it as a whole, and not focus so much on the resolution. I still find the resolution just a little embarrassing. The moral ambiguity of Ozymandias' position was lovely, taken by itself—but once you return to the specifics of the psychic-teleporting-exploding-monster, the whole moral dilemma and psychological subtlety get rather lost in the absurdity of the plot. All this time, the whole conspiracy, the Comedian's death, all Rorschach's investigations, have been leading up to this? This? Egad.

Anyway. I've already talked about how much I liked Jon, but I'm going to say it again. He's just so well-meaning and so utterly detached from human concerns, and he ends up looking oblivious or even a bit daft, when really he's just—so absorbed in knowledge, science, nature, space, but human interaction is the one thing he just can't get a grip on. And yet he goes a long way out of his way to try to do right by humanity, and he has compassion, and even something like regret.

He seems to be incapable of doing anything for the wrong reasons, incapable of immorality, not because he's an amoral being, but because he does everything with such total innocence. Not the innocence of stupidity or naïveté, but the innocence of complete understanding. It's amazing that there can be such innocence in omniscience, the same innocence one seems to find in complete vapidity. I am still completely fascinated by his position as an almost omnipotent being who, however, can't really be said to do anything by choice, because he sees the universe turning like clockwork, and the lives of men, too, and knows that nothing can be changed: that all is prescribed, including his own awareness of that prescription... and while he is serene in understanding this, and knows better than to rebel against it... he is still human enough to feel a kind of regret and pity, and indeed the full range of human emotions, at the proper moments. Even while he knows that nothing matters.

I said before that I respected Rorschach, but couldn't like him. The more I think about it, though, the more I find that I do rather like him. It's just that you can't pity him—he wouldn't even stand for that—so respect is almost all you can really give him.

The only moment when one might, conceivably, pity Rorschach is at the very end, when Jon destroys him: when he tears off the mask and one sees that he actually has tears streaming down his face, and he shouts—he shouts, this man who has remained calm and cool throughout every other frightful scenario since he first donned his mask—probably knowing that Jon really will kill him. That no one will know the truth, because he's the only man in the world with the integrity to give it to them and damn the consequences; and nobody wants the truth. His motives are hard to understand; hell, everything about him is hard to understand, and maybe it was just reckless vengeance that made him want to go back and tell the world the truth at the end anyway. But whatever it was, he was ready to die for it. No, not ready to die: it wasn't a possibility: it was a certainty. He insisted on dying rather than backing down. It wasn't vanity. No one but Jon would ever know. And Jon doesn't see the world that way.

Nite Owl was mostly cloying and desperate and embarrassed about himself, which worked well but didn't particularly endear me to him. And as for Laurie... just argh. The worst thing about her wasn't even that she was stupid and vacuous, but that she was presented as though she was actually intelligent and useful anyway—as though this was the best that could be expected of a woman, and we should like her in spite of her irredeemable idiocy, because after all she's female and she can't help it. Agh!

I'm not even a feminist, but for heaven's sake, Moore, if you're going to write an "empowered" female, is it so hard to invent one who doesn't have her own ass and tits on her mind all the time, and doesn't end up with a boyfriend by the time the story is over, or fall in love with anybody, tragically or otherwise, but just... is? A woman who has some higher purpose than sucking a guy's cock or popping out babies or something?

But anyway. As I've said before, the things I really loved were the little revelations that came up along the way: the blot tests as metaphor for the world, symbolic of nothing; Jon's Vonnegut-esque coming-unstuck-in-time, with the somewhat unsubtle watchmaker stuff, even. And I loved the way the pirate comic ran parallel to the rest, and sort of told Ozymandias' whole journey, and, possibly, gave us its ending, which the final chapter doesn't. Damnation after all. Good intentions paving the road to the Black Freighter.

And I'm really looking forward to the movie, even though I suspect I will come away from it headdesking dramatically.

The Golden Compass by Phillip Pulman

Comments are here.

I really do mean to read the other two books; the themes of the first one entirely fascinated me. It's just that the characters didn't. There was nothing terribly wrong with it, and quite a bit about it that was entirely excellent—just not quite excellent enough for me to rush out and spend twenty or thirty dollars on the next two books.

The Valley of Fear by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

Comments are here.

Of the four Sherlock Holmes novels, I'd say this one ranks at third—better than A Study in Scarlet, but no match for the other two. I did intensely enjoy the first half of it, and once I'd finished the second half, I saw that Doyle had not been wasting my time after all. But I still think one oughtn't to spend half a novel wondering if one's time is being wasted, even if the answer is no.

The General in His Labyrinth by Gabriel Garcia Márquez

I already failed to comment on this book before, because the only thing really to be said about it is that Márquez is wonderful and penetrating and benignly merciless. After finishing this book, I quickly went out and bought two more books by Márquez, which I've been holding off reading because they're both short, and I don't want to run out of him. The General in His Labyrinth was by no means comparable to One Hundred Years of Solitude—well, for sheer scope, what could be?—but it proved to me that Márquez is an author you can trust, and not one whose success came by a mere fluke. He is very, very good.

Dracula by Bram Stoker

Yep. Finally got around to reading Dracula.

I had suspected even before starting the book that Dracula himself would be in it very little, but I hardly guessed just how little. Oh, he was about plenty for the first couple of chapters—but after that, he was entirely absent, except as a shadowy figure or a bat flapping at the window, for around two hundred pages. Only then did they at last start talking about him again... and his presence seemed a little more tangible when they were investigating his mansion, gathering clues from the movers, et cetera. But in fact none of them actually saw him—save Jonathan, momentarily—until his last moment in London, when he came home to find all his coffins closed against him, threw himself out the window, and disappeared again. And so once more there was nothing but rumor all the way to the end of the novel, when, at four hundred pages, they were finally able to pry open his coffin and kill him, instantaneously and somewhat anticlimactically, with him unable to speak or put up any kind of fight.

For that reason, the novel felt a little unbalanced to me. The first long section in Transylvania is very dark, and could almost have been a novella unto itself. It made a nice opening. The next part was all about Lucy, more melancholy and worrisome than frightening. And then the last two hundred pages featured our band of heroes, Jonathan, Mina, Arthur, Quincey, Dr. Seward, and Van Helsing hunting Dracula around London and across Europe, and finally catching up with him at the castle.

Beginning and ending in Transylvania was a good choice, and helped restore the balance some. But we were sorely lacking some sort of resolution on Dracula's side—some speech or something.

Though I suppose this wasn't much a book for speeches. Van Helsing offered a couple, but they felt a bit forced. Once in a while Stoker would dip into a penetrating idea, but on the whole he didn't venture any further into philosophy than he absolutely had to.

Which reminds me: one of the strangest things to me was the way everyone in the novel seemed to use the word "simple" as a compliment of the highest degree. Everyone who was good was described as kind and loving and brave and simple. And I couldn't help thinking, from almost the beginning of the book, that practically everyone in it was a perfect Hufflepuff, the very image of Cedric Diggory, strong and brave and loyal and... simple. Totally void of intellectual ideas. You'd think, since the whole book is written in journal entries, there'd be plenty of opportunity for reflection. But instead everything is fact and action.

Then again, I suppose in the midst of such a crisis, one does put off reflection for some other time, and philosophical questions become superfluous, because there are real questions in front of you, and they need answers. And after all, Seward wasn't so bad. I think it was only after we started viewing the men from Mina's perspective that I began to think of them as big dumb blond brutes, because all they ever seemed to do was sweep Mina in protectively, cry on her, or brandish their fists in rage. They seemed to become more animal as the book wore on.

Which, too, was appropriate, and if I thought Stoker had done it on purpose, I'd actually be very impressed: it would be a rather Camus-esque way of presenting the thing. I mean, by the end, their objective of destroying Dracula had pretty well consumed them all. They were riding as if to war, thinking of nothing but vengeance and triumph, ready to face death; and Van Helsing was off cutting women's heads off, in much horror. There really wasn't any place for philosophers in that setting.

No, all in all, I'll grant Stoker that he did a pretty good job. It's just that I don't care for his kind of heroes. Such heroes are necessary, and not the less right or the less beautiful for their simplicity, for the fact that they've become like brutes themselves—but on the other hand, there's something frightening about them. There's that thoughtless Christian zealotry in them, that crusader-spirit, certain beyond the first thought of doubting that this way is the perfect and only right way. It leads me to associate the vampires with various minority groups, Gypsies or Muslims or Jews perhaps, accused of stealing children or whatever other crimes and blasphemies.

I mean, never mind the drinking of blood: what if the Muslims—or whoever—had come in and were converting the people of London to Islam? Would that not, in Christian eyes, be the same as or worse than turning them into the walking undead? Their souls lost to God, denying the truth of the Savior? Would not their good Christian friends weep as bitterly over this loss as if it were a death, and view them as if they were really no longer living: as if their conversion had actually turned them into demons, or at least signified that demons had stolen into them and turned them with evil promises? And would not good Christian men—as they would undoubtedly call themselves—see fit to destroy whoever was responsible for this evil? The vampires—the Muslims?

There is a parallel there, and not a pretty one. I don't mean to assert that we must accept absolutely everyone and all the strange customs of the world, including the drinking of unwilling victims' blood and the turning of them into demons. I merely point out that, by the end, Dracula had become a crusade in the name of Christ, and not merely a vampire-hunt. Interestingly, Stoker didn't entirely shy from the topic—Van Helsing himself points out that, at the time of the novel, things are being done with electricity which the very men who discovered electricity would have condemned as witchcraft. And those men themselves would have been burned as wizards not long before their times. And so step by step we move forward. Out of the darkness, I suppose.

The thing is, coming only a hundred years ago as it did, Dracula seems like something of a step backwards, since books like Notre-Dame de Paris and even Dostoevsky's Christian works showed a more open-minded and less pedantically orthodox view of religion in decades very much preceding Dracula's publication. If the book had been written a century earlier, it would have seemed to fit; a century before that, I'd have deemed it a perfect marvel of modernity. But in 1897—a book like this, I'm afraid, has no surprising qualities, and is only popular fiction.

This Side of Paradise by F. Scott Fitzgerald

First of all, Fitzgerald writes just beautifully. All the more wonderful, since this was his first book—he was twenty-three. Twenty-three. "Here, Heraclitus, did you find in fire and shifting things the prophecy you hurled down the dead years..." It is simply stunning.

Otherwise, however, I'm not so sure about this book. It's one of those coming of age novels—one that traces the path of a man from childhood through youth and to maturity, and through all the changes that take place within and around him, until at last he becomes someone. I've read a few of these books before, and have never found them very interesting. The only exception I can think of is Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, because that was all image and idea. And I still never particularly liked Stephen.

I don't know—for me, there's some kind of archetypal thing that characters have when they interact with a plot, that makes them meaningful in a symbolic rather than a literal way, and gives them more a universal significance. I don't want to read a novel like a psychological case-study. And then, in these coming-of-age novels, it's only too obvious what the author believes. Whenever the character learns a lesson, it's clear that the reader is supposed to agree with the lesson, to have learned it already, or to be delighted at being handed this epiphany. It's somehow too direct, too arrogant.

In fact, toward the end of the book, I had actually begun to dislike it. There was something so self-satisfied and self-assured about its tone, something so flippant about its dismissal of other authors and other ideas—and even when it was right, there was still the sheer conceit of it to contend with. It was all so aristocratic, and even when Fitzgerald pretended to reprove his hero's egotism, there seemed to be applause in the reproof.

The hero—Amory Blaine—decides against writing a book, because he holds authorship as too serious an undertaking to begin without a definite purpose, a definite meaning. There are too many writers, he says, turning out old ideas in new suits, wasting shelf-space with cheap stories that won't outlive the decade. And Fitzgerald? What did he say in this book? Many things, to be sure, that are true—but I doubt any of them were things that had not been said before. Then what was his point? To illustrate the limbo of his generation? But that limbo is not unfamiliar to us, even now.

He rails about how the true geniuses, like Nietzsche and Schopenhauer, get sugar-coated and fed to the masses through popular literature. And by "popular literature," he means George Bernard Shaw. But what exactly is the difference between Shaw talking about Nietzsche, and Fitzgerald talking about Shaw talking about Nietzsche?—and Fitzgerald talking about Wilde and Wells and Butler and Voltaire and Rousseau and bloody everyone else. Half the damn book he spent talking about how his characters felt about literature. As if I cared how his characters felt about literature! I'm reading, aren't I? Don't you think I have my own opinions about literature?

And in the end, when Amory is realizing himself, he discovers—in a rather Nietzschean moment—that he cannot be both great and good. The question he fails to ask, however, is: can he be great? He is capable of courage and sacrifice as an expression of himself, but lacks any real human sympathy. It is an interesting and perfectly plausible dilemma, a familiar one, perhaps even universal—but it does not render him a god.

He is an egotist, a self-proclaimed egotist. And I think the difference is right there. A god does not need to be an egotist. His greatness is such that what in another man would be egotism in him manifests as greatness. He does not reprove himself; he does not hesitate. Raskolnikov is not Napoleon, because Napoleon—would know.

Anyway. Ultimately, I think Fitzgerald's idea was to imitate the styles of various authors, one by one, in order according to his respect for them, beginning with authors he deemed merely clever, such as Wilde and Shaw, then moving up to authors who seemed to him more mature, like Wells and Butler, momentarily Joyce, Tolstoy in a random socialist speech, and culminating finally with a handful of Nietzschean revelations.

If I'm right, then what he did was certainly interesting, and a ponderous undertaking. But I can't say it was an entirely successful one. His Joyce hardly came off at all; his Nietzsche was dubious. His Wilde was rather dry. And I'm not even sure where Wells was, though he must have been in there somewhere. I don't know—it's been ages since I've read The Great Gatsby, and I probably should read it again now, to remind myself that I do like Fitzgerald. Not that I didn't enjoy this book, since mostly I did; but the pretension of it was really almost too much.

War of the Worlds by H. G. Wells

This book had a promising opening, but after the first few chapters I began to lose faith. It wasn't until the last couple of chapters that Wells surprised me by developing some themes and redeeming the whole book. In the end, it was actually a rather uncharacteristically optimistic story, for Wells. Man's birthright to the planet, purchased at the price of so many billions of lives forfeited over time to natural selection. No death, says Wells, was ever in vain, for in life or in death we all contribute to that whole which is Man. Not bad, indeed.

It amuses me, in retrospect, how Darwinian the book was, almost from the first. It wasn't until near the end that he brought up natural selection as such, but all along he kept contrasting the men who deserved to live—the determined, the intelligent, the bold, the industrious—with those who merely slowed up and weighted down the rest by their cowardice, their hesitation, their laziness. And though the artilleryman turned out to be a flake, his speech seemed much in line with Wells' idea: that those who die in their weakness, their failure, should die, and should even be willing to die, because for them to die is a service to humanity as a whole, strengthening it, attenuating its virtues. Another very Nietzschean sentiment.

I was also much fascinated by Wells' discussion of that fleeting emotion which attended the realization of humanity's having, as a race, been overthrown. He called it a feeling outside the normal range of man, but I think in this he was mistaken. After all, how many groups of men have in the past been overthrown just as callously, by other men? Wells himself pointed out how Tasmania was taken, and whole races wiped out of existence. Undoubtedly the tribe which, in its own context, is the paragon of civilization, reaching almost to the height of the gods, is as appalled as Wells' character to find itself routed suddenly by some strange, overdressed, ferociously armed, merciless, and tyrannical new race which has set its mind to conquest. Columbus was an alien to America, and he came with his ships and his war machines. That is to say nothing of the slave trade, or the Holocaust, or the biblical suppression of the Jews by Egypt—or of the Canaanites by the Jews. At what era have men not been reduced suddenly and senselessly to the rank of mere beasts? It has been going on for as long as man has been man.

Wells was careful to give us little room for sympathizing with the aliens, but he did return to draw the parallel again and again between men and beasts, and to talk about how we should learn humility, and be less arrogant in our superiority over other creatures. How it can have failed to occur to him to say over other men, I don't know—maybe he was simply aiming for more subtlety than to state his meaning outright. He made it hard to sympathize with the aliens, asserting that their evolution had taken them beyond the possibility of emotion or sentiment, until reason was all they knew... and I think in this case, his warning was for us not to become those aliens. If so, however, his warning was probably several millennia early. I would not say we are getting there just yet.

Aaaand there you have it. I may not read much, but I sure do make long posts about it...

Meme of long.

2008-11-24T04:19:46Z

Because BOOKS > RL.

+++INTRODUCTIONS+++

1. What's your name?

Gray. Or Grayswandir.

2. Do you read a lot?

...Not really, actually. I just read the kind of books that make people assume I must read a lot.

3. What's your favorite genre?

If we can call "classics" a genre, then I guess that's the one. My favorite books are the ones that transcend genre -- the kind of books people will still be reading, still enjoying, and still learning from in a hundred years. Or several hundred.

+++FANTASY AND SCI-FI+++

4. Do you prefer fantasy or science fiction?

In some cases, I can hardly tell the difference between them. Both fantasy and sci-fi put characters in incredible circumstances, and force them to make choices, take journeys, learn lessons, struggle, triumph, fail, and so on, in a symbolic manner which parallels real human experience. In fantasy your villain might be an evil wizard; in sci-fi, he might be a super-evolved alien being. Fantasy has magic; sci-fi has advanced technology. When you get down to it, the only major difference is that fantasy takes so many of its staples from mythology: dragons, elves, dwarves, sorcerors, demons. Sci-fi just represents the same ideas with different, more modern symbols.

Still, I have to choose fantasy, because while the two genres can be almost interchangeable, they usually aren't. In my experience, fantasy novels tend to focus more on the human element, and take more time for character and plot development. Sci-fi novels are often more concerned with facts and explanations for all their outlandish phenomena, and the characterization suffers from that.

Or maybe it's just that I've got a thing for mythology, and I'd generally rather read about wizards than aliens. ;)

5. What's your favorite fantasy book/series?

Lord of the Rings, hands down.

6. Who's your favorite fantasy author?

I'm tempted to say Zelazny, just because I don't want to leave him out of this section, and I do adore him, weird though he is. Gaiman and Pratchett also come to mind. But no... it's going to have to be Tolkien.

7. What's your favorite science fiction book/series?

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. ;)

8. Favorite sci-fi author?

Probably Philip K. Dick. He wrote some really great short stories, and The Man in the High Castle is wonderful. (I seem to remember really liking Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, too, but it's been years since I read it, and I hardly remember it now.)

+++MYSTERY, HORROR, AND THRILLERS+++

9. Which do you prefer: a puzzling mystery, or a terrifying thriller?

I don't read much in either genre, but I guess I'd probably find the mystery more engaging.

10. Do you have a favorite mystery novel?

The only mystery/detective books I've read are Doyle's Sherlock Holmes and Chesterton's Father Brown mysteries. And a couple of stories from Chesterton's Club of Queer Trades. Sherlock Holmes is definitely my favorite. As for particular novels, I guess I'll go with The Hound of the Baskervilles.

11. A favorite horror novel?

The only horror novels I've read are Stephen King's. I do really like Stephen King; his style is captivating, and once I pick up one of his books I always have trouble putting it down -- even though I have never once found any of his conclusions satisfying. My favorite of King's horror novels is probably The Dark Half. I've never actually found King's stories very horrifying, though...

+++ROMANCE+++

12. Do you read romance novels?

No.

13. How about gay romance novels?

That sounds a little more tolerable, but still... no.

14. What's your favorite?

I think the closest thing to a romance novel I've ever read was Lolita. ;)

+++CHILDREN'S AND YA+++

15. What's your favorite children's book?

The Harry Potter series. If I have to choose a book, I'll go with Order of the Phoenix. (Prisoner of Azkaban is a close second.)

16. Is it the same book that was your favorite when you were a kid?

Heh, no. My favorite book as a kid was The Black Stallion.

17. What's your favorite YA book?

Honest to god, I still have no idea what even constitutes YA. I would have thought the Harry Potter books were YA, myself: they're about teenagers, right? Does YA mean books about teenagers? I don't even know!

I'm not sure I've ever read anything in the YA genre (except for one horrible teenage-vampire book I read in middle school). Maybe I can switch my answers, and list the Harry Potter books here, and The Devil's Storybook as my favorite little-kids'-book?

18. Did you actually read it as a YA?

N/A, I think.

19. In general, do you prefer children's books over grown-up books?

No. In general, I don't care for children's books. They tend to be all action and no introspection, and where there is introspection it's usually rather simplistic and moralizing. I prefer a bit more subtlety.

+++CLASSICS AND GENERAL FICTION+++

20. What's your favorite classic novel?

Heh. Need I repeat? Well, it's still Notre-Dame de Paris. Priests and poets and gypsies and scholars and soldiers and hunchbacks and little white goats, and faith and sin and alchemy and fatality. <3

21. What about general fiction?

Like, just... er... books that don't fit into a genre, but aren't old enough yet to be labeled classics? I have trouble knowing where to draw the line. Is Slaughterhouse Five a classic now? Nineteen-Eighty-Four? A Clockwork Orange? Probably classics, huh?

...What about Fight Club? That one should work.

22. What classic novel do you just *not* *get*?

Hm. Well, usually if I hate a novel that much, I give it up within a few chapters. The only one that springs to mind, that I actually finished, is Jude the Obscure. I didn't hate it, I just... cannot figure out what so many people find so revolutionary about it. I didn't feel like I gained anything by reading it.

23. Do you have a favorite play or drama?

I'm going to say Tom Stoppard's The Real Thing. Hamlet and Macbeth and Julius Caesar should probably come first, really -- but the next question is about Shakespeare, so I'll give this one to Stoppard.

24. What do you think of Shakespeare?

I've always been wary of jumping on the "Shakespeare is the greatest English writer EVER!" bandwagon, but -- to date, I've not yet read anyone who can match him. Joyce, almost. Milton, I'm told, but personally I don't see it. I've read no other author who is so consistently penetrating and universal -- such a master of language, of wit, of symbol, of the range of human thought and emotion... I just can't find another author to compare. He's not my favorite, but I've got to give credit where it's due. He is amazing.

+++POETRY+++

25. Could you pick a favorite poem?

I always say "Kubla Khan," by Coleridge, but I'm not sure that's true. It might be "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock." Or Pope's "Essay on Criticism," except that it's just so damned long.

26. What about a favorite poetry collection?

I think the only poetry collection I've ever read straight through, front to back, is The Collected Poems of Stephen Crane. That's partly because I love Stephen Crane, but also partly because his poems are really short.

I've also read most of The Selected Works of William Blake and The Works of Alexander Pope, and quite a bit of The Works of John Donne. I don't know that I can pick a favorite. Hell. I'll just go with Blake.

27. Who's your favorite poet?

Gah! Why is this so hard? Look... I'm just going to say Gerard Manley Hopkins and move on, okay? Because I cannot choose.

+++COMICS AND GRAPHIC NOVELS+++

28. Do you read comics or graphic novels?

Sure, sometimes.

29. Do you have a favorite series?

Definitely The Sandman. (I love Batman as a canon, but there are too damn many crappy Batman comics for the series as a whole to be my favorite.)

30. A favorite book?

You know, I actually think Watchmen might be the one, in spite of everything I said about it initially. But if not Watchmen, then Season of Mists.

+++SHORT STORIES AND NOVELLAS+++

31. Do you prefer short stories (or short novels) over full-length novels?

No, I almost always prefer full-length novels. There's just not enough space for plot or character development in a short story; I usually feel like something is missing.

32. What's your favorite short story?

If Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground counts (I think of it more as a novella than a short story), then definitely that. Otherwise, Dickens' A Christmas Carol. Or, if that's also too long, maybe Chekhov's "The Bet."

33. Favorite short story collection?

Well, I usually just flip short-story books open to random stories, rather than reading whole collections together. But of the ones I've read straight through, I'd pick one of the Sherlock Holmes collections -- maybe The Return of Sherlock Holmes.

34. Do you have a favorite short story author?

Philip K. Dick, I'd say. Dostoevsky, also. Doyle... Authors whose last names begin with D, apparently?

+++NONFICTION+++

35. What kind of nonfiction do you usually read?

I rarely read nonfiction. But in numbers of books, I've read more philosophy than any other type of nonfiction, I think.

36. Do you have a favorite nonfiction book?

Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil.

37. Read any interesting biographies?

The only biography I can recall reading was a giant-sized, 500-page, full-color illustrated book on Napoleon, the text of which consisted entirely of journal entries and letters written by his secretary (Claude-François de Méneval) and his valet (Louis Constant Wairy). I wound up adoring Napoleon in what was probably an entirely inappropriate way, but I also liked Méneval so much that I went on eBay and bought a 1910 printing of his memoirs... which I've been meaning to read for like eight years now...

38. History books?

Er. To my shame, no -- I don't think I've ever read an entire history book.

39. Politics?

No. I flipped through one of Bill Maher's books one time...

40. Religious texts?

Fewer than I should have. I've read almost all of the Old Testament (I keep meaning to finish it, but the trouble is that I have to take notes when I do, which is kind of a pain in the ass), most of the New Testament, about a third of the Qur'an, two translations of the Tao te Ching... a few chapters of the Satanic Bible... I don't know if Dante's Inferno or Paradise Lost (and Regained) count for this section...

41. How about books on mythology, fairy-tales, or other cultural stories?

Several mythology books -- mostly Sumerian/Babylonian and Graeco-Roman stuff. As for the fairy tales, etc... not all that many, alas. I've read some individual fairy tales, but not whole books of them.

+++ELEMENTS OF FICTION+++

42. What's the most important element of a novel? Plot? Characterization? Style? Themes? Happy ending?

First, I'm going to hark back to Pope: "In every work regard the writer's end, / Since none can compass more than they intend." Depending on the book's purpose, a bulletproof plot might be essential, or it might not be. Powerful characterization might be essential, or it might not. I think mainly an author needs to know which one to focus on, in the context of his particular story.

I personally tend to go for the interesting themes, all else being equal. A book with good characters and plot and so forth will be a good book, in all probability -- but it won't be a great book unless it implies something beyond itself.

43. What kind of plot interests you the most?

Er. One that centers around a theme, without being pretentious or unsubtle about it, I suppose...

44. What kind of characters usually appeal to you?

Oddly, I'm rarely interested in the hero. I generally prefer the supporting cast -- the Teacher/Sage (Gandalf, Dumbledore), the Grim, Silent, Unsympathetic But Powerful Guy (Morpheus, Strider!Aragorn, Batman, Vetinari), the Jester/Trickster/Wit (Lord Henry, Mephistopheles), and whatever the hell Faust/Frollo/Satan is -- Conflicted-Between-Good-and Evil-Guy?

45. What is your favorite book overall?

Still Notre-Dame de Paris. ;)

+++PASS IT ON+++

46. What's the last book you read?

I just finished reading two books: Fitzgerald's This Side of Paradise and H. G. Wells' War of the Worlds. I'm going to need some time to think over both of them. Fitzgerald impressed me beyond words at first, but toward the end of the book I was getting a rather pretentious, self-congratulating vibe from him, and that sort of turned me off. Wells completely bored me for the first 200 pages or so, and then turned around and delivered an interesting and thought-provoking conclusion. So... ambivalence on both fronts, for the moment.

47. What are you reading now?

Nothing yet. I just finished Wells.

48. What are you going to read next?

I'm not sure. I'm supposed to be reading a whole list of things recommended by various people on my friends-list, but none of them particularly appeal to me at the moment. Fitzgerald went on and on about Tolstoy, and how he and Nietzsche were practically the only great authors ever, so I guess I should get on with War and Peace. But egad, it's so huge. o_O

49. Is there a book you would recommend to everyone on your friends list?

I've found that my friends-list does not tend to all like any of the same books. I'd love it if everyone would read The Chronicles of Amber, though. ;)

50. Tag five people to fill out this meme:

Not tagging -- but I'd certainly be curious to hear from hamsterwoman, agguss, subcutis, likethesun2, zinniazayda -- well, and pretty much everyone else, really. ;) I love book memes.

EDIT: Okay, maybe BOOKS > RL is not a perfect equation, because sometimes RL has BABY CHICKENS:

OMFG LOOK AT THIS CHICKEN.

That is all.

Also, if you haven't given me your address already: DO IT so I can send you a card. :D

A somewhat more general literature-themed post.

2008-10-14T09:30:37Z

I finally watched "The Crooked Man," after waiting as long as I could (and watching "The Naval Treaty" a second time with my sister). Not bad. I mean, it wasn't much of a mystery, like, at all -- but that's Doyle's fault.

Watson was better in this one, on the whole, although he had a few moments of headdesk-inducing idiocy right in the middle. I'm starting to get the impression that Watson is just there to keep people from getting too irritated at Holmes' utter disregard for social etiquette. Holmes almost never greets anyone, shakes hands, acknowledges gratitude, or anything of the kind. Luckily, Watson is there to be polite for him.

Anyway, the last scene was pretty adorable. :D

And from hamsterwoman: 1. Do you remember how you developed a love for reading?

Nope. I honestly have no idea what got me into reading. As far as I remember, my dad talked to me about nearly everything, from science to philosophy to religion to art... except for literature. We didn't have novels around the house, and we almost never went to the library. I always loved reading at school, but still I think it surprised my parents a little when I got to be thirteen or fourteen and suddenly became obsessed with literature. It wasn't something they'd reinforced. I do remember my dad talking to me about Shakespeare, and how he thought Julius Caesar was one of the greatest things ever written, but he had found the Elizabethan style very hard to read at first. I remember thinking that was strange, because I never found Shakespeare hard to read.

Anyway, I guess the books that made me really love literature -- not just enjoy the act of reading, but love the idea of literature, as an art -- were Zelazny's Chronicles of Amber and Victor Hugo's Les Miserables. Zelazny introduced me to the first set of characters I ever really loved, and Hugo introduced me to literature as a means to philosophy, psychology, history... I guess he showed me for the first time that literature wasn't just for fun: it could mean something, too.

2. What are some books you read as a child?

The Black Stallion and its numerous sequels were my favorite books, between third and fifth grade. I also loved The Giver and was rather fond of The Egypt Game. And for some reason I really liked this book called Dragon's Milk, which I became obsessed with after attempting to read it in third grade and finding it too hard. Next year we moved to Hawaii, so it wasn't until fifth grade, when we moved back to Phoenix again, that I was able to read it at last.

3. What is your favorite genre?

I don't really think of "classics" as a genre, but I guess that's my best option. What I mean by "classics," though, is books whose stories are so universal, or so timeless, that decades or centuries after their publication, they're still as vital as they were the day they were published. Whether they're fantasy, sci-fi, horror, or something else entirely, is immaterial. I think every genre is capable of producing enduring pieces of literature.

4. Do you have a favorite novel?

Victor Hugo's Hunchback of Notre-Dame. And second place goes to Moby Dick, I think. My favorite novelist overall, though, is Fyodor Dostoevsky.

5. Where do you usually read?

Lately, on the ground in a concrete hallway near the philosophy building at ASU. Last year -- in the break room at work, or at my desk.

Otherwise, on the living room couch, or my bed, or... well, hell, almost anywhere quiet. I read most of Atlas Shrugged in the back yard, with the goats. :)

6. When do you usually read?

When I have spare time, but not enough of it (or the right conditions) to get any writing/editing/outlining done.

7. Do you usually have more than one book you are reading at a time?

Pretty much always. Though sometimes some of the books I'm "still reading" are books I haven't actually picked up in several months.

8. Do you read nonfiction in a different way or place than you read fiction?

Nietzsche's philosophy works are pretty much the only nonfiction I read for fun... I read those the same way I read any non-trivial literature, like Dostoevsky or Joyce or Shakespeare, which is to say, I read such books only when I know I'll have time to think seriously about what I'm reading.

Other than Nietzsche, though, I only read nonfiction books for research purposes, so I usually read them at my desk, in order to take notes about them as I go.

9. Do you buy most of the books you read, or borrow them, or check them out of the library?

Buy them. I only read books that have either been recommended to me very strongly, or that are such "classics" that, whether or not I end up enjoying them, I feel my collection will be improved by their addition.

10. Do you keep most of the books you buy?

See above. I wouldn't buy them at all unless I was pretty damn sure I was going to want to keep them. (And I wouldn't read them unless I considered them worth buying.)

11. If you have children, what are some of the favorite books you have shared with them?

I don't have children, but if I did, I'd want them to at least try out the Harry Potter books, The Black Stallion, and The Devil's Storybook, which is the most delightfully subversive children's book ever. XD

(As for the kids I teach at work, sheez, I'd be happy if they'd just read the papers we give them during class...)

12. What are you reading now?

His Last Bow, of the Sherlock Holmes series. I think I've actually read all of the stories in this book before, except for "His Last Bow" itself. But I'm reading it over from the start anyway.

I'm also still somewhere in the middle of The Red and the Black, The House of the Seven Gables, and some other books that I haven't picked up in so long that I should probably just start back at the beginning.

13. Do you keep a TBR (to be read) list?

Not a physical list, no, but certainly a mental one. Right now it consists mostly of books zinniazayda recommended to me, and all the books on my shelves that I've been meaning to read for years anyway...

14. What's next?

The Case Book of Sherlock Holmes, if my current obsesssion holds out, or else either The Autumn of the Patriarch (Marquez) or The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay (Chabon). Or Dracula, because Halloween is coming up and I've still never read that one.

15. What books would you like to reread?

Like hamsterwoman, I rarely reread entire books, though I often reread random passages. I think the only novels I've read multiple times are The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Les Miserables, and The Picture of Dorian Gray. Oh, and Lord of the Rings.

If I had the time, though, I'd read Moby Dick again, and Dostoevsky's The Idiot, and pretty much everything I've read of Nietzsche's. And The Chronicles of Amber. I kind of really, really ought to read those again.

16. Who are your favorite authors?

Heh. Well, obviously, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Victor Hugo, Friedrich Nietzsche. James Joyce. Herman Melville. Also Oscar Wilde, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Charles Dickens, Kurt Vonnegut, Roger Zelazny, J.R.R. Tolkien. Shakespeare, Stoppard. Probably Ayn Rand. Denis Diderot. William Blake. God, what an ecclectic lot...

"I am inclined to think--"

2008-10-09T23:05:32Z

Finished The Valley of Fear. The plot was better than those of the other Sherlock Holmes novels, I thought, although as usual I found the gigantic block of backstory a bit tedious. It did help that the backstory was ultimately kind of a pseudo-mystery in itself, with a twist at the end. Still, the whole problem ultimately felt pretty unresolved to me. I mean, the mystery was solved, which was enough for Holmes, I guess -- but a lot of good that did. :P The epilogue didn't help much, either. It was kind of just a footnote, like, "For actual resolution, see The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes."

Actually, I really liked the first part of The Valley of Fear, which read to me like a completely separate novella from the second part. By itself, it would have made for one of the best of the Sherlock Holmes stories. The second part turned out pretty interesting by the end, too, and I can't say it should have been omitted. But it wasn't as strong; it had nothing to do with Holmes, yet it needed Holmes for an introduction, or there wouldn't have been enough to hold a reader's interest. I guess it's partly just a problem of narration. Watson's first-hand accounts are always interesting, and often amusing; but when he gives second-hand accounts he's much more sober and removed, and just not as much fun to read.

So: a good story, but definitely not my favorite of the Holmes novels. (For that I'm torn between The Hound of the Baskervilles -- which is probably technically the best one, but is somewhat lacking in Holmes himself -- and The Sign of Four -- which is ridiculously far-fetched and weird, but has no shortage of Holmes and features several of my favorite scenes, and certainly my favorite opening and closing paragraphs.)

Anyway. Other than reading, I've not gotten much done today. I ought to be ticked off, because my sister, after staying out all last night with friends, decided this morning to back out of plans she and I had made more than two weeks ago. Which... on principle, it annoys me that she chose to blow off plans we'd made well in advance, in favor of partying with her friends... but I'm not actually annoyed, because it means I've got the day to myself, and don't have to go anywhere or talk to anyone, which suits me fine. If I could just stop thinking like Watson, in convoluted parentheticals, I'd try to write something.

...Or, wait. Maybe that's me, not Watson. :/

<3

2008-10-04T20:07:04Z

After more than a month, I finally finished reading Gabriel García Márquez's The General in His Labyrinth. (Not that it's long -- it isn't. I just haven't had much time for reading lately.)

It was very good. It's a historical novel -- a fictionalized account of the last months of the life of General Simón Bolívar, "The Liberator," who secured independence from Spain for a number of Latin American countries. But the story isn't about heroics, conquests, or successes of any kind. The General is mentally and physically exhausted, and indeed almost an invalid, at the age of 47. The themes are much like those of One Hundred Years of Solitude -- decline and disillusionment and destitution. And, well... solitude.

I'm not sure what to say about it except that it's Márquez: simple and vivid, bleak, sincere, unforgivingly human, at once profound and mundane. I can't even put spoilers behind a cut, because there are no spoilers. It's not that kind of novel. There isn't climax or resolution or twists or surprising revelations... there's just this meandering account of the General's final journey, interwoven with memories and reflections on his former glory, successes tainted with the growing realization of futility.

Needless to say, I enjoyed it a great deal. I need to find more books like this one.

(ETA: Oh, hey. I just found this One Hundred Years of Solitude icon I made for a roleplay sockpuppet, like, two years ago. *keeps it*)

Yep, Batman again. Comics this time, though.

2008-08-24T22:47:44Z

Been reading a lot of Batman comics lately. I didn't read many comic books when I was a kid, because the few that I picked up were so bad (apart from Sandman -- for a while I really thought Gaiman was the only good comic writer ever). But now that I have access to stuff that wasn't published circa 1960, the genre feels much more respectable, and really pretty awesome. :D

There will be lots of spoilers in here.

Hush by Jeph Loeb.

Jeph Loeb isn't a great storyteller, but the art in this book is so absolutely stunning that I enjoyed every page; in fact I had trouble getting around to ever turning the pages. And really, Loeb did all right. There were things I really liked about the story, and I think he had some interesting ideas... he just didn't pull them together in a very interesting way. Most of what he had to say about Batman and the various villains felt just a bit trite, like the kind of "revelations" that have probably been made dozens of times in the history of the series.

So I don't know. The plot was actually pretty good, and it was well-written enough... it was just sort of typical: Batman fights villains, does detective work, reflects on past, faces own demons, sustains injuries, ultimately unveils plot, carries on. But really, it wasn't bad. I think the only reason I'm having trouble praising it is because I subsequently read another book by Jeph Loeb, Dark Victory, which was just horrible. So now I'm having trouble believing that Hush didn't suck too.

But in any case, it was worth reading for the art alone. Just gorgeous.

The Killing Joke by Alan Moore.

Well, it's Alan Moore, so of course this one was very well-written ~~(mostly... though my sister and I both, separately, burst into uncontrollable laughter when Batman comforted a weeping Gordon with the words, "Let it come")~~. The art was also amazing, at once very cartoonish and very real -- very exaggerated, but also very detailed and beautifully shaded and expressive and alive. In some ways it was even better than the art in Hush, because it wasn't so intentionally showy -- just really, really good.

As for the story, I enjoyed it a great deal, but... I still felt like something was ultimately missing. I loved Moore's idea, to really capture the Joker's character, to explain how he came to be what he is, and examine what he perceives himself to be; to show why madness has such a strong appeal for him, why he considers justice a joke, and why he's so fascinated by, and drawn to, Batman. He's suave and dangerous and just the right balance between charming and horrible, and his humor is just dark enough, just mean enough. And oh my god, that gun at the end, Batman's shocked expression, and then the flag -- "click click click," and, "God damn it. It's empty." Oh my god, I laughed for like a minute straight. I love you, Joker, even though you're a terrible, terrible man.

The Joker's song was pretty awesome, and his position, his "message," while flawed, was believable; and Batman's debunking of his theory, with not just Gordon but himself as (dubious) proof, was well done. I can't really say what it was that seemed to be missing from the story. A conclusion, maybe?

I mean, the Joker tells that flashlight joke, "See, there were these two guys in a lunatic asylum..." and the joke is funny, but then... that's it. They laugh, and the book ends right there. Ends just after a frame that sort of looks like Batman is, like... tickling the Joker, or something; like they've just become fast friends after all the unspeakable things that have just happened throughout the book. Gordon being tortured within an inch of his sanity, and Barbara being paralyzed and practically molested... Just, whoa, what?

I guess the joke was supposed to represent Batman and the Joker's relationship, how they're both crazy, and Batman, thinking himself the sane one, is trying to offer a helping hand, offering to make the Joker his friend and save him somehow -- and this is the Joker's answer, to point out that they're both far too mad for that, both too mad to even exist outside of their asylum. Least of all together. And I guess that's why Batman burst out laughing, too -- because the joke is just so appropriate, so them. But still, it was a kind of strange ending. It seemed to really demonstrate that Batman is precisely as cracked as the Joker after all, and that maybe the Joker was right. Except that there's nothing he can do to send Batman over the edge, because he already is over the edge. This is his insanity.

Anyway, like the other works of Moore's that I've read, this one left me feeling sort of ambivalent, really liking it, and yet not quite liking it as much as I feel it deserves... and not being sure whether that's my fault, or Moore's.

Dark Victory by Jeph Loeb.

This thing was so boring it was practically unreadable. Part of the problem is that the art was just horrible, flat, expressionless, with wonky proportions and ugly characters and just ugh. But even aside from that, the grammar was bad, the arrangement of the dialogue was confusing, and the story was repetitive and uninteresting. Each installment retold pieces from all the previous installments, and failed to integrate them into the story so that they would seem natural; the characters said things that should have been incorporated into the narrative, because they made no sense as dialogue... Blah.

Also Jeph Loeb seems to have a habit of trying to pack every single villain into each of his stories. Overkill much?

Arkham Asylum by Grant Morrison.

Holy shit, man.

First of all, Dave McKean was the perfect choice of artist for this book. I don't even think the book could exist if it weren't for McKean. The art is thoroughly, thoroughly disturbing.

But I don't mean to discredit the amount of detail Grant Morrison put into his descriptions for every single panel, either. I've got the edition with the script printed at the back, and wow. I'm about to run out and buy stacks of books by Jung and Campbell and Crowley, because I'm completely embarrassed by how little of the genius of the book I picked up while reading it. It's just packed with visual allusions to mythology and religion and mysticism and psychology; the amount of symbolism in every page, every scene, every line, every underlying idea, is mind-boggling.

There were still things about it that seemed off to me, though. I mean, the setup was fine: asylum breakout, inmates demand to see Batman -- and knowing Batman, he would choose to go. Maybe more out of masochism than heroism, really. He was a little too confessional with Gordon, I thought, and Gordon was a bit too fatherly; their relationship felt a little off. But then, I can't think of a better way to have incorporated that uneasy comment about how going to Arkham would feel like coming home.

The Joker was fucking excellent, and I loved his reaction to, "I say we take the mask off. I want to see his real face." -- "Oh, don't be so predictable, for Christ's sake! That is his real face." Maybe that was partly just an authorial device to prevent Batman's being clobbered and unmasked by all the inmates en masse, but it was also so, so true -- and the kind of truth that the Joker would recognize better than anyone else.

I wasn't so sure about Batman's total failure at word-association. Surely this is a man who can think on his feet, and answer questions without revealing any more about himself than he wants to? I get that the point was to show how afraid Batman really is of examining his own psyche, and it’s a very interesting problem; I just don't know that his totally tripping right the fuck out over a few words quite fit.

Then things sort of degenerate into a game of hide and seek, which is a pretty good setup to pit Batman against each of his old enemies in turn, to have them each present to him some separate fear that haunts him, and let him conquer them one at a time... but it sort of... I mean, most of them come at him with accusations, revelations, insidious ideas, and he only refutes them with physical might, kicking, punching, stabbing, so that he still always comes off as somehow impotent: they confront him with internal fears, internal demons, and his only defense is an external one, destruction. Which, come to think of it, is pretty accurately representative of Batman as we know him. Here is a man who seriously cannot deal with internal problems. To the point that he would rather jab shards of glass through his hand as a distraction, apparently.

I loved Harvey, and loved how -- I think -- he actually made a choice to let Batman go at the end, without really consulting his coin. I loved his comments on the moon, expressing his outlook on the world. I didn't understand why Batman was apparently setting everyone free. I mean, it's a nice parallel for Pandora's Box, hope and all; but I'm not sure why Batman would want to open that box. I guess maybe it was his only way out?

Anyway, Arkham Asylum is definitely my favorite of the books so far. It kind of seems like an entirely different medium, almost an entirely different genre, an exploration and analysis of the entire Batman mythos rather than an actual story about Batman. It felt...

Well, it felt not like something that actually happened, but like a vivid depiction of the sum of Batman's nightmares. Thanks to McKean, the thing really does have the feel of a nightmare, everything shifting and vague and somehow utterly terrifying in its shapelessness; there are all these dark hallways and abandoned rooms, and of course a house is representative of the self or the mind in dreams anyway, and all these lurking demons, and... the way Batman talks, to Gordon, to the inmates, to the psychoanalysts, feels disjointed and dreamlike; his thoughts are muddled; he seems to be jumping at shadows. The Hatter says, "Sometimes I think the asylum is a head. We're inside a huge head that dreams us all into being. Perhaps it's your head, Batman." And clearly... yes.

And if it is intended as a nightmare, then it is significant that he conquers them by force, one at a time: a hero archetype would have to. His inability to play the word game would fit with a nightmare sequence, too. And Harvey's role: in Batman's mind, there's still hope for him. So yes -- if the book was intended to be a glimpse inside of Batman’s mind, at his darkest moments... then it is utterly perfect, in every aspect, and really one of the best pieces of fiction I've ever read, never mind just comic books.

Batman: Year One by Frank Miller.

Very, very good. I really liked this one. I prefer it quite a bit to the story in Batman Begins, although I also recognize that it wouldn't have translated to film well at all. I loved what Miller did with the characters, how grim his Batman is, and his Gordon, fallible and human and kind of... desperately just. I loved Batman's imperfections, his failings in combat because he doesn't quite know his own ropes yet. I loved how he comes up with his crazy bat-man idea in a semi-delirious state of severe blood loss and near death.

This Batman is very human, driven, obsessive, and a little impatient; at every moment he seems at risk of being discovered, exposed, ruined, or killed; he's uncertain a lot, in danger a lot, but thankfully he's always got one more ace up his sleeve. Alfred keeps him in line with sulkiness and sarcasm. You've got to love Alfred.

All around, Batman: Year One feels the most like what I've always imagined Batman to be. Apparently some people (including the artist who illustrated the comic o_O) have taken issue with Miller's realism, his attempt to take Batman seriously and regard him as a real human being. These people apparently believe the superhero genre is, by nature, fantastical and juvenile, and should remain so. Well, I think those people are idiots. It's not as though Miller's stories aren't epic, exaggerated, thrilling, with unlikely escapes and amazing innovations; the guy is still writing Batman. He's just not writing a clunky, cliché, redundant Batman: he's writing a Batman you can actually believe in.

And whoever thinks writers of fantastical themes shouldn't take their work too seriously needs a lesson from Professor Tolkien, methinks. Sheez.

The Dark Knight Returns by Frank Miller.

This one just left me sort of speechless. I'm not actually sure whether it's the good kind of speechless. I liked it. I'm very impressed by it. I'm just not sure I... accept it, if that makes sense.

I loved Miller's idea to write a Batman who is old (well, old for a superhero, anyway). One thing that really bugged me was his making it impossible to figure out just how old Batman actually was; I tried to calculate it based on various clues, but never could figure it out. But anyway, he finally came out and said fifty-five at the very end, and fifty-five was just right. It means he quit the bat business when he was in his mid forties, still young enough for the job, but probably beginning to slow down. I can picture him giving up the game at forty-five. And I can picture him hating every day of the next ten years.

And maybe I'm a sadist -- well, duh -- but I loved Batman's internal monologues in all the fight scenes, when he was always not quite fast enough or not quite strong enough, didn't quite have the stamina or the agility he was expecting from himself, couldn't breathe, started blacking out, taking bullets. I loved his continual cursing of his failing abilities, his "senility." And I loved his stupid suicidal arrogance, choosing to face that mutant kid hand-to-hand, not out of chivalry but simply because he wasn't sure he could.

I wasn't too sure about his recurring murderous thoughts, though. It didn't bother me that he kept thinking about killing people -- most of them would have deserved it, and in the Joker's case, it's true that Batman has basically killed hundreds of people by letting the Joker live; so the morality is very questionable there. No, what bugged me was how he kept thinking about it in a way that sounded malicious, as though he wanted to kill them more for pleasure than for justice. "It takes nearly a minute to fall from this height, and despite what you may have heard, you're likely to stay conscious all the way down. Thoughts like that keep me warm at night." And there he rescues Harvey not because of any moral objection to letting a man die, nor even because his vow forbids it, but purely because he has to know whether it's really Harvey or not.

And then, "Leaving the world no poorer -- four men die." What? Is this Batman talking here? I realize he didn't kill them, exactly, but... just, what?

Also, it didn't seem like we ever actually got resolution on Harvey's portion of the plot. Maybe I'm missing something.

I'm not sure how I feel about Robin the Girl Wonder, either. Miller did a pretty good job with her, better than I'd have expected, so, eh. But we seem to be short a Robin in this story. I'm not sure, but it looked like Tim got written out completely. I'm just going to pretend that Batman carried on for a while, post-Jason, with Tim, and then quit... because of Jason's death, but not directly subsequent thereto.

Anyway, apart from a few things like these, I did really like the story, even if it was pretty goddamn dark, even for Batman. The way the media comes down on him is absolutely brutal, and the charges leveled against him are not only terrible, but also... sort of justified. His fading legend, the way the kids think he's just a myth... it was just bleak. Really well done, but really bleak.

I liked the Joker, and his reaction to Batman's return -- "Batman. Darling." -- cracked me up. He was pretty careless, but then, subtlety has never been one of the Joker's strong suits. I can't quite decide what I think about his death -- whether it seemed in character or not, for him to kill himself to frame Batman. There are so many new factors; both of them are getting to be old men now, and the Joker's priorities may well have changed over the years, and getting the last laugh might mean something different to him now. And then, maybe he just didn't have any choice, if he was really completely paralyzed. Maybe he really did it because he wanted to die before the cops arrived, and not because he cared about framing Batman at all -- a desperate kind of last laugh, a false face of triumph, knowing he'd lost. And then, maybe he figured they'd both die together. He'd stabbed Batman enough times, apparently.

Mainly, though, what I'm ambivalent about is the end. Because it's got fucking Superman in it. A lot.

See, I've never accepted Superman as existing within the same canon as Batman. I want Batman to exist in the real world of human men, not some magical world populated with superheroes with superpowers. So as soon as Clark Kent showed up, the whole story lost credibility for me. And his role was so important that I couldn't just write him out in my head. Either Superman is canon, or this comic isn't.

It was really well done, and Superman was actually a very interesting character; I found his position, relative to Batman, fascinating. It would be Batman laughing at the council, saying of course we're criminals... it would be Batman giving the rest of the superheroes a bad name with his scare tactics and excessive force. All the more annoying to them, since Batman isn't even a real superhero -- just a rich kid with a vendetta, completely off his rocker and prancing around in a batsuit. I mean, all superheroes are weird, but Batman has got to be the craziest of the lot.

I did love his plan, and didn't predict the twist at all. Well, heck, even Superman bought into it, so it must have been well played. And then the funeral... all really well done. Poor Alfred. I wonder if he knew.

Not too sure about the very end, either; an army of vigilantes sounds like an unbelievably bad idea to me. Does Batman not realize that taking the law into your own hands is not for just anybody, least of all a bunch of impressionable young idiots who will follow whoever waves the biggest flag? None of these guys are actually reformed. They don't hate crime. Their parents weren't killed outside a theater. Bah.

But on the other hand, even if they're not great at being batmen, they'll probably do better than Gotham's current police force, especially now, with Gordon gone and chaos everywhere. We could have done with more closure on Gordon, come to think of it. We just kind of left him standing there.

Anyway. I can see now why The Dark Knight Returns gets so much press, both positive and negative. It's a really intensely grim and serious story, and it's very, very good -- but also quite a bit of a departure from the usual for a Batman comic. It's not even really a story about a hero. It's just a story about a man. It kind of belongs to some other genre.

Also, as an aside: the more comics I read, the harder it is for me to see Christian Bale as Batman. I still think he's way better than any of the other actors who've ever taken on the role, and when he's actually in the batsuit, he's damn good. And when he's playing the part of Bruce Wayne, playboy zillionaire, he's good, too. It's just when he's talking to Alfred or Fox or Rachel that he's all wrong. He just doesn't have that brusque, surly, uncommunicative moodiness that's so definitive of the real Bruce Wayne. Bale!Batman smiles. He makes jokes that are not dry or sarcastic. And that's not who Batman is. He's moral and good and just, but he's not nice, not friendly -- not even with Robin or Selina. He's kind of a complete bastard, actually.

But, heck, he's playing a very young Batman. I know Bale is in his thirties, but I like to think that The Dark Knight Batman is only twenty-six or so, and maybe at this early stage he's still more open: the bat has not yet consumed the man. Maybe this deal with Rachel is what breaks him, and he'll be moodier in the next film. I hope so, though honestly I'm not expecting much. I can't see how the next film can even approach The Dark Knight, no matter what they do. Seems to me they've almost made it pointless to make another Batman film of any kind ever again.

I still love the Joker, though. I love that instead of a chemical-accident-grin, which would have looked silly on film, they gave him those scars -- and instead of using chemicals to carve smiles into the faces of his victims, he uses a plain old knife. Very fitting. Ledger's Joker is not quite what I picture when I read the comics, but neither do I find him to be in any way inconsistent with the comics. I saw the film again the other day, and found that whenever Ledger was onscreen, I could imagine the comic book Joker, with his long face and slender body, making all the same moves, the same expressions, smiling the same mocking, malicious smile with too many teeth; I could superimpose the cartoon right over the living man, and every step suited them both.

I'm also reading Gabriel Garcia Marquéz's The General In His Labyrinth. So I haven't abandoned real literature or anything, I promise. ;) Oh, and if anyone is comparing this to my post about Watchmen -- well, Watchmen is better than any of these comics (bar maybe Arkham Asylum, which is like a whole different genre, anyway); I was just more critical of it because I had set such high standards. I appreciate it a lot more now that I've got in in proper perspective.

Watchmen

2008-08-16T22:10:42Z

I really, really wish the cover of Alan Moore's Watchmen was not plastered all over with "Groundbreaking!", "The greatest piece of popular fiction ever produced!", "Peerless!", "A landmark!", "Staggeringly complex!" I really wish it wasn't.

Because I'm positive that if I'd come to it expecting nothing more than a graphic novel, with superheroes in capes and stuff, I'd have been very, very impressed. Overwhelmingly impressed, no doubt. But instead -- in spite of my best efforts to ignore the reviewers and banish all preconceptions -- I came to it expecting the greatest graphic novel ever written. And hell, maybe it is the greatest graphic novel ever written. But when something has been praised that highly, what you bring to it is mostly judgment, and unfortunately most of what I've ended up thinking about it is simply, "Well, it wasn't that amazing."

Which, like I said, is almost certainly purely a consequence of having been told -- by the blurbs on the book itself, by the reviewers on Amazon when I bought it, by the previews for the upcoming film -- that I would be, you know, completely blown away by its epicness. I really wish that I had somehow stumbled across it by accident, because then I could have actually been blown away. Why the devil are we so incapable of seeing past our own preconceptions, and appreciating something for what it is and what it was intended to be, rather than some shapeless anticipation of the impossible?

It seems to me that if people were able to judge things -- including each other -- for what they are and what they're intended to be, half the world's bloody problems would be solved right there. But hell, that's a whole other topic.

Anyway, I liked Jon a lot. Actually, chapter four, where Jon is on Mars, is my favorite part; that was the one section that made me think, for a while, that the reviewers might not be wrong in proclaiming the utterly nonpareil magnificence of the book. It was very Kurt Vonnegut, I suppose: Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time. But it made sense for Jon, far more than for Billy Pilgrim -- being able to see his life spread out like a mountain range, and living all of it at every moment, even while living each moment distinctly. It was still a very comic-book sci-fi sort of story, but I guess the fact that Jon was such a neat character made the silliness of his genesis sort of disappear into the background.

His indifference was just so sincere and straightforward; there was no pretense about anything he did. He really was a god, and I think his distance from humanity, and his inability to understand humanity, was the foremost proof of that, more than his strange abilities and powers. He was pretty much incapable of doing good or evil, simply because everything to do with humanity was so far below his notice. Although curiously, he did seem compassionate, in a detached sort of way. I guess in that sense he reminded me a lot of Destiny from Sandman: already knowing the past, present, and future, knowing that fate cannot be changed, knowing that it is futile to have any feelings about it at all -- and yet still subject, apparently, to a kind of vague regret and pity. A helpless god.

Yes, I liked Jon.

The only other character I liked was Rorschach, though I use the word "liked" a bit more loosely in his case. I think what I mean is respected. He seemed to be practically the only character with any real integrity. Unlike Jon, he had no apparent compassion at all, and it's kind of hard to say what his motives were for being a "hero," if he can be called that, since he had no personal qualms about killing or torturing innocent people if he thought they stood in the way of finding the guilty. Pretty much a loose canon, that guy. But he was clever and detached and realistic, and stayed calm and methodical, whatever the circumstances, despite being by no means invulnerable. So I was impressed. And at the end, he was the only one to whom the truth was more important than utopia, and even though I can't say morally whether that was right or wrong, I do respect it, because for him it wasn't even a choice. When he said he would never surrender, he meant it. "Not even in the face of Armageddon."

It's harder to say what I thought of Ozymandias. His story felt very cliche and pretty... over-the-top comic-book-villain ridiculous to me. I mean, maybe I expect too much from my comic-book villains. But, you know, super-genius-guy as villain is nothing new, and neither, I should think, is that Crime-and-Punishment-descended idea of committing terrible evils in the name of an ultimate good: of becoming a Napoleon, an Alexander, and recognizing the sacrifices that must be made on the way to the utopia of a united world. I mean, I guess it's a pretty profound moral question, and if it wasn't something I'd already given so much consideration to, thanks to Dostoevsky, it might have felt more remarkable here. But, you know. Nothing new under the sun.

Mainly, though, it was the whole, "So I built a giant alien monster with a psychic human brain that will teleport and destroy half of New York, thus averting global warfare" bit that was just... what. I mean, seriously, what. Not only is that plan just outlandish and overly complicated, it doesn't even make sense. I mean, if he'd staged an actual alien invasion somehow, okay, maybe. People will unite against a common enemy, yes. But why is a trans-dimensional monster exploding in New York a good reason for Russia to pull out of Afghanistan? You can't band together against an enemy that self-destructs upon contact with your dimension. There's not even any reason for America or Russia to suspect that the "aliens" destroyed New York on purpose, and there's no way to predict if or when it might happen again, or to defend against it... Why the hell would world peace result from one instance of exploding alien? I just don't understand.

I realize Ozymandias had plans to continue uniting people by some other, future method, but even so. I just wasn't buying it. Especially after he tried to get rid of Jon with that Intrinsic Field Subtractor thing. I mean, maybe he knew Jon would come back, but just figured it would take him a while? Even so. For the smartest man in the world, the guy was not terribly bright right there.

Nite Owl was a wuss. He was an interesting character, and his complete dorkiness was kind of cute sometimes, but really the guy had no actual... it really did seem to be all about getting dressed up and playing superhero for him. And the fact that he was so embarrassed about it only made that more obvious. It's hard to imagine how he ever kicked any ass with that kind of attitude toward himself and what he was doing. He was so uncertain and wavering about everything. It's amazing Rorschach put up with him at all.

Nite Owl/Rorschach were pretty OTP, though. That scene where Nite Owl gets all pissy about how difficult it is trying to be Rorschach's friend, and Rorschach is kind of like, whoa, did he just say...?, and they shake hands, and then Nite Owl gets all awkward and Rorschach just sort of stands there looking at his own hand for a minute. That was awesome.

But Nite Owl is still a wuss. He and Laurie deserved each other.

It's difficult for me to express just how intensely I loathed Laurie. I mean, in the beginning I found her a little irritating, but by the end I was about ready to strangle her for her sheer stupidity and vanity, and I could not even conceive what we were supposed to like about her. Practically all she ever did, for the entire book, was talk about herself, complain, or both. I think it was usually both. Egad.

The main scene that made me hate her was her argument with Jon on Mars, though. She complains over and over about how "emotionally disconnected" Jon is, and how he can't understand her, which, no, he can't -- but it is painfully evident for their entire conversation that he is trying to explain rationally the reasons for his own viewpoint, and she is not trying at all to understand him or to speak in terms that he can understand. There are plenty of perfectly good arguments she could have made to convince him to help humanity, arguments that would have appealed completely to his own sensibilities, and I kept thinking eventually she'd hit on one of them, just by accident. I mean, Jesus, the most obvious one is simply the fact that Jon's own consciousness, his own ability to appreciate the beauty of the martian landscape, the reactions of elementary particles, is a consequence of Earthly life -- that a universe so magnificent deserves spectators, like Jon, like human scientists who, albeit feebly, are trying to understand and assimilate the majesty of it all.

And I don't know, maybe that argument would have swayed him, and maybe not, but for god's sake, it would have been better than her crying and raving about her stupid childhood, irrelevantly and adolescently and just... argh. The one woman who had an opportunity to convince God to save mankind was too busy feeling sorry for herself to even try -- how awful is that? It was kind of offensive, actually, not because Alan Moore chose to write such a horrible female character, but because he presented her as if it was okay that she was so horrible. As if we were suppose to like her in spite of her being horrible, because women are just like that and they can't help it. Which just... argh. Argh.

Anyway, I guess that's enough of that. Oh, but the other thing that I did really like was the bit about how the whole world is like a goddamned blot test, and everything we think it means is just the result of our desperate human brains seeking symbolism in the mundane, the meaningless. That was another really great chapter, come to think of it, on par with Jon's coming-unstuck-in-time chapter. And really, there were a lot of very nice little observations like that, scattered through the book. The overall plot just didn't feel solid enough to do them justice. And there just... there was so little subtlety. I sort of felt like Moore didn't give his readers very much credit. Not as much as I'd have liked, anyway.

The pirate story running parallel to the various newsstand scenes was really neat, though. Very artfully done. And let me not forget to say: the art is fucking amazing. Start to finish, every panel, absolutely gorgeous. If I were being fair, I'd spend as much time talking about the art as I've spent talking about the plot and characters, but there's just not much to say except wow. No complaints, no criticism. The art was perfect.

Anyway. Those are my rather lengthy two cents.

Relatedly, and yet not: I've been rather depressed about how much publicity and hype The Dark Knight has gotten, and I guess now I realize why. Because it's like all the hype surrounding Watchmen, which made it so hard for me to appreciate it, so inclined to judge every little thing about it. I went to see The Dark Knight expecting your typical superhero flick (more respectable than, like, Spiderman or something, but still inevitably silly); I figured the best thing about it would be Bale in his batsuit looking pretty. I was blown away because I had no expectations. If I'd been looking for something revolutionary, profound, nuanced... hell, maybe I'd have been utterly disappointed. I don't even know. I hate that I keep hearing people saying they're not interested in seeing the Batman movie, and I can't tell them how good it is, becuase if I do, they're bound to be disappointed when/if they see it, because its greatness... is relative to what it's intended to be. Relative to its genre and what is demanded of that genre, and relative to the preconceptions you have about it before you walk into the theater. Or pick up the book. Or whatever.

I just wish we could see things as they're meant to be seen, and judge them as they're meant to be judged. But look, here I am quoting Pope again. "Whoever thinks a faultless piece to see, thinks what ne'er was, nor is, nor e'er shall be. In every work regard the writer's end, since none can compass more than they intend; and if the means be just, the conduct true, applause, in spite of trivial faults, is due."

Amen to that.

ETA: I'm pretty excited about the Watchmen film now, though. I was skeptical before, and I'm still a bit worried about how much they'll leave out, but it has the potential to be very neat. Hopefully they'll do like they did with V for Vendetta and make the chick not suck in the movie version...

The Golden Compass

2008-08-10T20:38:46Z

Following several people's recommendations, I've started reading His Dark Materials. I finished the first book yesterday. It was... very much not what I was expecting.

First of all, I was not aware until a couple of days ago that The Golden Compass was part of the His Dark Materials trilogy, and that's probably going to confuse me for a while. I saw the trailers for the Golden Compass film a few years ago, and thought it looked like typical juvenile fantasy nonsense, and had no interest in it whatsoever. At the same time, I often saw people on my friends-list talking about His Dark Materials, which I assumed to be something entirely different, since I gathered that it had something to do with theology, and it sounded rather adult and rather... well, dark. It would never have occurred to me to connect the two titles.

So I was sort of surprised when the guy at the bookstore directed me to the Young Adult section to look for Pullman, and more than a little wary when I actually picked up the book. Especially when I flipped through the first few pages and realized the main character was a little girl.

I've never much liked books about kids, and I've especially never liked books about girls -- but luckily, Lyra was not that sort of girl. I was pleased to see her playing war games with the boys, climbing roofs, absconding with boats, smoking cigarettes, getting drunk in the cellar, and shaking coins out of skulls in the crypt. Pullman did an excellent job of making her a believable tomboy, the kind of girl who has obviously grown up without much feminine influence whatsoever, and has barely realized that she's supposed to be female herself. Not only that, she seems to actually have a profound dislike of everything she perceives as feminine (except for, briefly, Mrs. Coulter). I was really surprised that Pullman was bold enough to write a female character whose strength is that she does not act female -- that he wasn't afraid piss off the feminists by implying that her boyishness was a superior trait.

I'm still not exactly fond of her, because she just seems kind of... I guess the word is "unimaginative," as Pullman said: she does not think about anything, ever. Ever. She just does things, and sometimes she plans a bit first, and she's clever enough and all that, but there is absolutely nothing of the philosopher in her nature. Which I guess makes her ideal hero material, so that's all right. It just means I don't really like her.

I'm not actually sure I like any of the characters, come to think of it. Well, Iorek. I like him, probably because he's the most utterly stoic and unsentimental of the lot of them, without being an asshole about it. And I like Farder Coram just fine, and The Master... they just don't really do that much.

For some reason, Lord Asriel makes me think of a cross between Disney's Gaston and Brontë's Heathcliff. Yeah, I have no idea. I kind of figured he might turn out to be her father, though. He just had that sort of air in dealing with her. And Mrs. Coulter puts me entirely in mind of the White Witch in Narnia. It's a good thing Pullman never actually put her in a sleigh, because that would have been too much.

Anyway. As for Pullman's writing style, I find it... very weird. The thing I noticed first was that the man spares no expense in vocabulary; in spite of the fact that he's writing children's books, he goes right ahead with his "perennial" and "oblation" and "lorgnette" and "soporific." Sometimes he goes completely overboard with ridiculousness like "desultorily," which is not only a bit pretentious but also just sort of cumbersome. But overall, I was impressed with his diction, and I find his writing to be far superior to Rowling's (the man actually understands grammar), and even Gaiman's (I love Gaiman, but he does tend to dumb things down an awful lot when he writes for kids).

Still, he's not perfect. Actually, for the first chapter I was not much impressed at all. There were some random perspective shifts that seemed a little amateur, and Lyra's daemon was just nonsensical. Like, she felt him bristling, and he was a moth. Firstly, I don't think moths bristle; secondly, I don't think you could feel it if they did, especially through the cloth of your shirt. And he talks, not telepathically, but with an actual audible voice, which is somewhat conceivable when he's an ermine or whatever, but a moth? It's not like he has vocal cords. Does he just, like, project sound, or what?

My main problem with Pullman's writing, though, is simply that it's children's-book writing. His method of setting up the plot is very linear and straightforward, very formulaic, and many of Lyra's little adventures along the way are very formulaic, too. But mostly it's just the fact that Pullman, like every other children's book author I've ever read, writes in this style that is just so... superficial. Simplistic. It's all event, surface, action, explanation, but there's no poignancy, no emotion. I don't feel any connection to any of the characters; I don't even feel connections between the characters and each other. Pullman tells us they feel sadness or love or hope or excitement, but they're just words. There's no intensity behind them.

I think this stands out with Pullman particularly because he spends so much time not being condescending. He's totally careless with death and gore, ripping bears' jaws off of their faces, tearing out hearts, slitting open seals and eating their kidneys raw, and burning dead children on pyres. And his themes are so obviously mature, advanced, well-studied and many-layered, and his diction is so strong -- it seems very strange that he still winds up saying things like "she felt angry" or "it was cold and she was afraid" or whatever, instead of actually illustrating it. I mean, it's not that it's bad. He's done very well, really -- for a children's book. I just would have liked something more.

But anyway. Enough for my critiquing. On to the themes. And the themes? Are completely awesome.

For a while, the daemons were the most fascinating thing to me. I figured out pretty quickly that they were supposed to represent anima/animus figures, as soon as I realized it was being taken for granted that people's daemons would be of the opposite sex. I really liked the idea of people having an external "soul" which was what set them apart from animals, a kind of Jungian subconscious intuition manifestation, which is able to detect and understand things that our conscious, physical minds can't perceive, but which we can come to know by communicating with our "souls." I think I would have preferred it if daemons could only communicate with their own bodies, but otherwise the metaphor was very well done. The fact that children’s daemons have a greater range of manifestation is consistent, and the fact that a witch’s daemon has a greater range of travel. The taboo about touching other people's daemons, too, and the daemonless boy who was as horrifying and freakish as a zombie. All very nice.

I also liked the bear's armor as anima: instinct instead of intuition. And the king of bears, completely out of his element, out of sync with his instincts, and acting like some kind of domesticated beast.

And speaking of daemons. When that goose started talking about infinite worlds that exist simultaneously and interweave without ever really touching -- I actually laughed out loud and thought, "Oh, great, it's like that damnable Many-Worlds Theory in quantum physics." Little did I know that Pullman was actually, literally talking about that theory, and about quantum physics. The dude in the bears' cell started talking about wavefunctions and how his daemon could taste probability, and I sort of went o_O at him, and then Asriel started going on about collapsing possibilities in elementary particles. And I had to *facepalm* for a while, because for God's sake what made Pullman think it would be a good idea to write this as a children's novel? It is inscrutable as a children's novel. It's got fucking wavefunctions in it! Next he'll be talking about the flavors of quarks or string theory or something. What the heck is he doing?

And then the whole business with Dust as the "proof" of Original Sin. I can't quite tell what that means yet; it's not sin itself, obviously, so it seems that either sin attracts Dust, or else the accumulation of Dust encourages sin... or maybe there's some other direct, positive correlation between Dust and sin that's more obscure. In any case, the whole topic is so fascinating and completely heretical that I can't even believe Pullman was able to publish it for a YA audience, never mind the fact that he actually won awards for it. Jesus!

I must say, though, I could barely stop laughing at the idea that Adam and Eve "knew their daemons," and that was Original Sin. 'Cause if we're using biblical terminology, I think "knowing your daemon" is called, like, bestiality. Or if we still take your daemon to be your soul then it's something altogether Freudian and weird. But anyway.

I love the idea that the story of Adam and Eve is like the square root of negative one. You can't actually think about it as a real number, yet you have to use it to get the correct answers for other equations. I don't believe that about the Adam and Eve story in particular, but it's a wonderful analogy for mythical symbolism in general. Though, to be pedantic, it's a philosophy that leads directly to the Copenhagen Interpretation, not the Many-Worlds Theory. :P

I also love the idea that "ye come from dust, and to dust ye shall return" is God's little "joke" about his own partly-sinful nature. I had never read that before, but it is beyond awesome.

But anyway, the thought that the Church would conduct "experiments" on children to see if they could be made permanently innocent, and stop accumulating the Dust of sin -- stop returning from dust to dust, as it were -- is so probable that it's actually kind of alarming. Making everyone dull and bland and uninterested, effectively turning them into zombies, soulless walking dead beings without knowledge or interest in Truth or Good and Evil or... man, this is just utterly, utterly wonderful. Why did it have to be a children's book?

And then the final stroke of genius, when Lyra and her daemon conclude that Dust must be good. Because those who oppose it are carrying out acts of evil. How easy it is, seeing those who oppose a force committing evils, to presume that the force they oppose must be good! I'll be curious to find out whether Dust really is good, or evil, or just morally neutral and coincidental, like knowledge itself; but the main point is the question, which I can't -- I can't even believe Pullman had the nerve to ask it. Wow.

The only thing I'm not entirely keen on is the idea of destiny, the way Pullman is addressing it, because it -- just doesn't make sense. Everyone keeps talking about how Lyra will only fulfill her destiny if she doesn't know she's doing it, and the witch talks to the Texan guy about how destiny is immutable (presumably) but we all have to act as if we didn't know about it, or we'd all just lie down and die of despair. But that's completely inconsistent. If it's Lyra's destiny, then she will fulfill it; and if part of her destiny is that she must never know what she's doing, then she never will know. That's what destiny means. And if the rest of us act as if we didn't know about destiny, then that's our destiny. We don't have a choice about it. I mean, you just... you can’t even talk about destiny as if it existed, because if it does, then that’s the only reason you’re talking about it, and it’s all just a convoluted mess. Blah.

Anyway.

I guess my overall reaction is mixed. I really, really like Pullman's themes, and his symbolism is very nice. But the writing is a bit too superficial for me, and so are the characters. Obviously, I intend to pick up the next book as soon as I can, and keep reading. But I'm hoping Pullman's going to start delving a bit more, and giving us the why as well as the what. Because I really don't care at all what the characters do. I only care what they think about what they do, and what it means.

(Someday I will learn how to write a review that's actually shorter than the thing I'm reviewing. But... not today, apparently.)

Pony salon photos!

2008-05-29T04:44:36Z

Yep, more pony photos. ;)

My sister and I actually made this set (and took the pictures) a few months ago, but we just got around to putting them online this afternoon. Eventually, we intend to take pictures of all of our pony shops and businesses... but this is the first one so far. We decided to do the hair salon, since we already had the "hair care" section of the website up.

You can check out the page at Ponyland Press by clicking the little banner, or you can just click the cut and look at the photos here. :)

Hello, and welcome to Twirler's Salon! My name is Hugs n' Kisses, and I've been working with Twirler at the Salon for over fifteen years. Let me show you around!

This is Twirler, the owner of the Salon, giving Magic Star her usual shampoo and trim. Twirler was one of the first ponies to open a business in Ponyland. She started as a barber nearly twenty years ago, and now her salon is one of the most successful shops in the town.

All of us here at the salon are accredited stylists, and have years of experience behind us. We pride ourselves on being able to create beautiful hairstyles for every occasion.

Here's Sundance admiring her bright new curls, styled by Snowbelle.

Looking for a glamourous new do? Our top-of-the-line shampoos, conditioners, and creams will make your hair shimmer and shine.

Here's Candy showing off her dazzling golden locks, styled by Moondancer.

Need a break from your daily chores? Twirler's Salon is a great place to relax. If you're feeling run down, step inside and let us pamper you with a new look. You'll walk out feeling beautiful!

Here's Soft Steps enjoying an afternoon of leisure, and a new hairstyle by Pearl.

Your kids will love it here too! We've got adorable styles for infants, toddlers, and children of all ages. Bring them in for a quick wash or get them all done up for a family photo.

And of course, colts and stallions are always welcome. Find your signature look at Twirler's Salon, and knock all the ladies off their feet.

At Twirler's Salon, we offer more than just great hairstyles. We offer a warm, welcoming place to spend an afternoon, the best in beauty tips and accessories, and confidence to bring out the show-pony in everyone. We hope to see you here soon!

(And for tips on creating great pony hair styles of your own, visit our online hair salon!)

GALLERY

Twirler's Salon is:
Twirler, Hugs n' Kisses, Pearl, Moondancer, and Snowbelle

Twirler's Salon...
Let your hair down!

And that concludes today's moment of insanity. :)

I'm getting old and I don't care. :D

2008-05-05T05:20:15Z

O_O

Okay, so, today I turned twenty-five. I don't really have time at the moment for existential angst regarding this fact, and besides, I've gotten so used to getting older by this point that I think I've given up being distressed by it. I embrace my rapidly increasing age. I suppose resignation is the first step toward zen. ;)

Anyway. I wasn't expecting to get anything today, because my sister had already given me my birthday present: a pit ticket to the Cure concert next month. (!!!) I had also bought myself a present, something I've been wanting for more than a year now: a tiny little $20 yinyang necklace made of silver and black onyx and mother of pearl. A couple of books, too. I was perfectly content.

Now, last year for my birthday, I went with my sister, Mom, and Mom's boyfriend to the Wildlife World Zoo, which was a lot of fun, especially because I got to pet the little pygmy goats. I realize this isn't everyone's idea of a good time, but I love goats. I was rather hoping we might go back to the zoo this year, or maybe to Rawhide, which also has a petting zoo.

Well, we didn't go to the zoo, nor did we go to Rawhide. Instead I got something for my birthday that I was not expecting at all.

See, I've always said I never want to have kids. Turns out I was wrong. I love kids. And now... I have two of them.

Literally. For real. Kids.

KIDS.

XDDDDDDDDDDD

They're about six months old. The black and white one is a neutered male -- a wether. The brown and black one is a doe. They are so, so beautiful.

I've named the wether Boris and the doe Nadya. Which I guess is kind of a joke -- I love the name Nadezhda, and have been saying for years that if I ever had a kid, and if she were a girl, I would name her Nadezhda. Well, what do you know. I have a kid. So Nadya she is. :) And Boris... well, he just looks like a Boris, all right?

Boris:

And Nadya, who looks rather like a gazelle:

They're still rather terrified of us, but they seem to be acclimating pretty quickly. Tomorrow when we buy some treats for them, I think we'll be able to get them to come to us. They do seem to like the yard. And each other. :)

Boris also likes the camera.

And Nadya is hard to photograph, because what she likes most is hiding behind Boris.

But here's one good shot, anyway. Gazelle! (They spring like gazelles when they run, too. :)

Goats, you guys. I have goats. In my yard.

GOATS. <3 <3 <3 <3 <3

My sister arranged all of this. Clearly, I have the most awesome family in the world.

YOU GUYS. I GOT KIDS FOR MY BIRTHDAY.

In other news, we just finished watching The Fountain, and now I think we're going to watch Pan's Labyrinth. And eat more pumpkin pie, which was my birthday cake this year. ;) Thanks to everyone who wished me happy birthday! You guys are all awesome. :D

V for Vendetta (Last post about this, really. Probably.)

2008-04-29T07:03:17Z

And now I've read the comic, also. It's pretty long. At least, it took me nearly five hours to read it.

And I'm not really sure what I think about it. At all.

On one hand, the movie seems rather superficial in comparison to the comic; but on the other hand, the comic seems rather irrelevantly convoluted in comparison to the movie. The character of V is much more sharply defined in the movie, and strangely he actually comes across as a much darker character, in my opinion, in the movie. That's probably because Hugo Weaving's intonation and body language lend so much to one's perception of the character, whereas in the comic he's just always this ridiculously smiling visage, and his tall pilgrim's hat looks just silly.

Also, though, his relationship with Evey was much more... dynamic, in the movie. In the comic he actually plays the hero with her, and she's this sheepish, frail little weepy child, and he seems to really want to keep and protect her, from the very beginning. In the movie, he has no place in his plans for affection. He's a busy man. And even when he begins to love her, his method of saving her is to make her strong enough that she will not need him anymore. His method is similar in the comic... but his reasons are not as clear. I don't really understand why he bothered.

Mainly, though, the comic was just incredibly hard to follow. I often wondered whether I would even understand what was going on if I hadn't seen the movie first. To begin with, the characters are very hard to tell apart. A comic should be the perfect medium for making recognition of various characters easy, because you have not just a name, as in your usual literature, but a physical image of a face. But the art in V for Vendetta is practically useless for this. The characters all look the bloody same. Even Finch I could only tell apart from the rest because he was always wearing that coat...

On the whole, I didn't like the art. My experience with comics is that the best writers always seem to get the worst artists; there's some kind of inverse law attached to them. It's not that the art was bad. It just didn't augment the story in any way. There was no special vitality to it; it didn't grip you at the action scenes or hush you in the quiet pauses; it just sort of carried the story along in its hazy way, telling you enough to get you through, but nothing more. I thought it fell far short of what it could have been, and should have been, to do justice to the writing.

When I was looking around for V for Vendetta icons (I finally ended up making my own, because although there were plenty, most of them weren't what I was looking for), I was surprised that none of them featured art from the comics. I'm less surprised now. There's just no mood in the comic drawings; it would take a lot of Photoshopping to bring it up to the level of art that the movie screencaps possess all by themselves.

And, hell, maybe that's the problem. It's really not bad art. It's just nothing to compare to the film -- which isn't really a fair comparison to make. Of course there's more mood in an actor's inflection, professional lighting, voice-overs, panning cameras, soundtack music, etc. than in a page of four-color printed panels. So you may take my judgmental comments with a grain of salt, here.

In any case. There were some neat moments in the comic which were all its own. For instance, the prelude to Part II was pretty awesome. Of course, my favorite parts tended to always be the parts where V was talking, and particularly the parts where he was waxing eloquent in metered, and occasionally rhymed, stanzas. So him at the piano was perfect.

Though speaking of Part II, I was surprised that it was written in three parts. A tragedy ought to be five parts, and five (V) would certainly have fit with the theme. Maybe it wasn't a tragedy, exactly. But three parts is a comedy. I didn't notice any weddings at the end.

I'm not sure why they changed "violet carsons" to "scarlet carsons" for the movie -- that seemed rather pointless, and since the V was important... I guess the scarlet just looked bloodier: a better visual? Maybe.

Anyway, I think I'm really going to have to consider the movie and the comic as two completely separate, almost unrelated entities, which both happen to feature a man in a Guy Fawkes mask fucking with a dystopian society, but which otherwise have very little in common. A lot of the same things happen... but in such different ways, with such different pacing, such different design, such different imagery, that they don't seem the same at all. The movie was not so much an adaptation as, like, an independent but derivative work. Everything sharpened up into keen focus, the characters, the visuals, the dialogue, the themes. The comic feels sprawling and disorganized by comparison. All these extra people, extra storylines that can scarcely be followed, and it comes to basically the same thing in the end... only much less dramatically.

I did like the comic, and I'm not even sure I could choose which was better, between it and the movie. Objectively, I almost think I can see that the comic was better. But nevertheless, it's Weaving and Portman and Rea and Fry who bring the people and the place and the story alive to me, and whom I'll want to go back and see in their roles again and again.

And, er, again.