Kate's blog

The party has officially moved

2012-01-18T11:54:00.003-06:00

I changed the domain hosting for my website, and then decided to just use Wordpress for my website since there was never a lot of content there anyway. So I migrated this blog over there. Will there be more posting? Who can say. But to find out, you'll have to hop over to katemacleod.net.

Movies in March

2011-06-08T19:21:00.001-05:00

Remember March? I just might, briefly.

Penn and Teller Bullshit makes a nice supplement to any critical thinking curriculum, provided you don't mind salty language and nudity, lots of nudity. A thought-provoking show, all possible sacred cows are targeted. Penn and Teller Magical Mystery Tour is much more family friendly, as they go to Egypt to explore the history of cups and balls. It led both my boys to try to do cups and balls themselves. Plus, Teller speaks. For some reason I was expecting him to sound like Harpo, which is silly since he isn't from the slums of turn of the century New York.

Rome Season 2 was not quite as good as season 1. There was no way they were going to get an older Octavian that was as good as the kid who was playing young Octavian, I think they would have been better served leaving the young one in. They apparently knew cancellation was imminent, as they started to rush the history a bit. I wished they could have taken the time to tell the whole story properly; it really was a very cool show, cut short. But then I do have a weakness for those, don't I?

Shakespeare Retold is a series of modern adaptions in modern language of a few of the plays done by the BBC. I'm usually pretty snobbish about Shakespeare being in Shakespearian language, but I loved these. They feature all sorts of "oh, that's guy from _____, and she was in _____" casting. The Taming of the Shrew was particularly well cast, but it was Macbeth set in a restaurant in Scotland that blew me away. I always was a tragedy girl.

Old Dogs starring Robin Williams and John Travolta. If not for Seth Green and Justin Long, I would have completely forgotten this movie already. Prince of Persia was surprisingly watchable for a movie about a videogame. Ben Kingsley in particular is delicious. I wished they'd gone a step further and gone full period piece with it, give it a little Peter Jackson LOTR attention to detail.

The Tourist was a not particularly good Johnny Depp film. The plot twists made it necessary to keep a distance from both of the two characters, which made it hard to care about either of them. Plot twists about characters can be compelling (I'm thinking Fight Club, The Sixth Sense), but mostly they just make me feel like I was cheated and lied to. In this case, it was obvious to me that Angelina Jolie's character had to be more than she appeared to be or Jolie never would have played her, and the second plot twist was just stupid. IMO, and all that.

Rango, on the other hand, was a perfect Johnny Depp movie. Sharp writing, and gorgeous animation from the crusty characters to the desert landscapes. Awesome, awesome movie. Can't wait for the DVD.

Despicable Me is mostly gone from memory now. I do remember being pleased with the three girl characters who had all sorts of layers and quirks, particularly the tomboy girl who favored pink. Nice to not just reach for the stereotype.

Too Fat for 40 is another Q&A with Kevin Smith, with one Q and a really long A. I'm not sure if Smith gets the irony of following up his "don't go to where the puck is, go to where the puck will be" story with a story about trying to get Bruce Willis to rehash bits he's already done.

Bottle Rocket was the first movie from Wes Anderson. I'm not sure how I've gone so long without seeing it, I've watched all of his others multiple times. I can see how he caught attention with this one, although it seems so quiet a film now.

The Newton Boys is another one I've been meaning to watch forever, based on the true story of the most successful bankrobbers ever. A fun movie, especially the clips that run during the credits with one of the real Newton Boys (the one played in the movie by Ethan Hawke) talks about his youth as a bank robber.

Lastly is the latest from Farah Khan, Tees Maar Khan. I loved this movie, although apparently some people have pretty strong feelings against it. I'm not sure why, I laughed out loud at several points. Akshaye Khanna in particular was awesome as the Bollywood actor obsessed with winning an Oscar (the movie is set in the long shadow of Slumdog Millionaire, but there are a few M. Night Shyamalan jokes in as well). Katerina Kaif continues to rise in my estimation; she's funny here as the actress who responds to every direction by adjusting her hair and/or makeup for the scene. She also has an item number that's smoking. I've never been too impressed with her dancing before, but under Farah Khan she really shines. It helps to start with a jammin' song:

Books in March

2011-05-25T13:05:00.000-05:00

Only three books read in March, although when I get to book three you'll know why...

The Spiritual Doorway in the Brain by Kevin Nelson M.D. was an interesting look at what's actually happening from a neurology point of view when someone has a near-death experience, what causes the tunnel and the light and the feeling of oneness. Highly readable.

Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition by Daniel Okrent is about to be (or perhaps already is?) the source material for a Ken Burns documentary. I found this book interesting as well. I had some sense of prohibition and what it tied into (women's suffrage, income tax and that), but not in all the detail it's presented in here. The people mentioned come to life, and all the little details are wonderful.

And finally, what took most of the month to get through was The Complete Works of H.P. Lovecraft. I'd read most of the major works before, but this time I hit them all in chronological order, even the stuff he ghost-wrote for Harry Houdini. That's a lot of Lovecraft, my friend.

Movies in February

2011-05-09T19:20:00.002-05:00

See what happens when you don't blog for weeks? I'm not sure I even remember some of these movies, or at least what I was thinking after I watched them. Well, let's give it a shot.

The Station Agent I picked up just because Peter Dinklage stars in it, and he's great in anything. I liked his character, he was slow to warm to other people even as they desperately want to bond with him. I'm not remotely interested in trains, but I liked his character's obsession of them; I could almost (but not quite) see the appeal.

The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest was the third in the trilogy. I think I liked the second film the best, but Noomi Rapace is very watchable. It's a shame she won't be in the English version of these films, but on the upside she's in the next Sherlock Holmes.

Chicago almost made me not hate Richard Gere. The number with the journalists as puppets on strings was particularly cool.

La Jetée is the short film (almost a slide show) that inspired 12 Monkeys. It was just the sort of niche thing I'd never have seen before Netflix. Odd, but interesting.

I Hate Luv Stories is an Imran Khan Bollywood film about a guy who works in, but hates, Bollywood films. He's also cynical about love in general and even god. I liked the set up, but my hope that he and the lovey-dovey girl would meet each other halfway was thwarted; his character had to make all the changes and in the process became less interesting. Still some clever bits in here if you've seen enough Hindi cinema to get the references.

October Sky was one we got to watch with the boys, about boys in West Virginia that win a science fair making rockets. It was a fun movie, although I'm not sure it helped me convince my own boys of the importance of math if you want to do anything cool.

The Machinist just made me sad. Christian Bale turned himself into a wraith for a movie that just wasn't worth it, storywise. It felt like the writer had read some Cliff Notes of Dostoevsky but didn't quite get what made Dostoevsky great. There were some elements from lots of different works of Dostoevsky but none of the real essence. Disappointing.

Gor I saw just because they had done the sequel on MST3K. They made the right call going with the sequel.

Catch-22 was a movie I was intending to see after reading the book, but caved and watched the movie first.

Ajab Prem Ki Ghazab Kahani is the latest from the director of one of my favorite Bollywood films, Andaz Apna Apna. This tries to harken back to some of the energy of that, and Ranbir Kapoor and Katerina Kaif are both game, but it doesn't quite reach the same heights. I think the missing element is a buddy. AAA was a Salman Khan/Aamir Khan buddy movie, and the two of them together were more compelling than the parallel love stories. Kapoor and Kaif come pretty close to being buddies to each other, but don't quite get there.

Machete is just what you'd expect from Robert Rodriguez: all sorts of actors doing things just
for the fun of it, and lots of improbable gun fights with cool music. I enjoyed it, but then I would,
wouldn't I?

The Darjeeling Limited was a movie I really wanted to like. I like Wes Anderson, and I love Satyajit Ray's films and Jean Renoir's The River, to which this is meant to be an homage. Jason Schwartzman, Adrien Brody and Owen Wilson as brothers should be a can't miss. Alas, there was some bit that was just missing. This was a bit of a stumble after the brilliant The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, but I think he more than made up for it with The Fantastic Mr. Fox (Oliver and I share a love of that cussin' film).

Casanova was a BBC miniseries that David Tennant and Russel T. Davies did before they did Doctor Who together. It has a lot of the same vibe, that same larger than life zaniness. I enjoyed it.

All About Eve? Should have seen this years ago. It's just as good as I'd heard.

Mesrine is a French film starring that guy who did the breakdancing in the museum's laser security system in Ocean's 12. Here he is playing France's most notorious criminal, a man named Mesrine who did many bad things. I found this movie disjointed and a bit of a downer; new people kept popping up too frequently to keep track of, but they all met bad ends. Even for a gangster film it was a downer. But stay tuned, there was a sequel that wasn't based on the subject's autobiography...

Books in February

2011-03-23T16:44:00.000-05:00

My reading usually has a certain flow to it, whether it's reading through one writer's life work, or swinging from writer to influence to their influence. Sometimes my reading is fueled by my writing, either researching something I'm trying to write, or reading things that will end up being research for things they prompt me to write.

Then there are months like February, where it's all pretty random.

The last thing I read in January was Among Others which was so perfect and wonderful I immediately wanted to read more Jo Walton. Not everything she's written is on Kindle, though, so I grabbed (being the theme of the month, at random) Tooth and Claw, a sort of Masterpiece Theater story of alliances and marriages and people being polite to the extreme. Only the people here are dragons. It may sound silly, but the details are just so perfect, both in the Jane Austenesque setting and in the physiology of dragons this just really worked. I loved that the females turned pink and darkened to red as they got older, a wonderful image which is such a cool plot point as well (females are only supposed to turn pink when they are affianced).

I also finally finished off all three volumes of Clockwork Phoenix. I've taken plunges into them before, reading this or that story, but in February I went through and read them all in order. They do have a lovely flow from one to the next when read in order, a neat trick in an anthology of different writers. In all three volumes, there were only one or two stories that didn't do it for me, and many that transported me to farflung places as I read them. A nice series of books, I'm hoping there will be a Clockwork Phoenix 4.

I read some Houdini last year, and it's been gnawing at the edges of my mind since. In February I read two biographies, to fill in some gaps and maybe tease out what my subconscious is working on. The latter is still a mystery, but at least the bios were good. The Secret Life of Houdini by William Kallush and Larry Sloman is based on the idea that Houdini worked as a spy. They didn't remotely sell me on more than the hint of a possibility of that, but it was still a thorough look at his life. Still, I found Houdini!!! by Kenneth Silverman the superior book. Both worth a read if you're curious about Houdini.

Finally, when buying those Houdini books at Amazon.com, the "people who bought that also bought" widget tossed up Sock by Penn Jillette. I love Penn & Teller and especially their show Bullshit but this was a work of fiction, I wasn't sure what to expect. It's definitely a different sort of book, narrated by an aetheist sock puppet prone to rants (but also to deep love of his people). It reads a bit like beat poetry, with song lyrics woven in (many I knew, some I didn't). The ending was perfection, and I'm not going to give it away. The whole novel is filled with sharp humor, equal parts laugh out loud and thought-provoking. It was hard to pick just one quote from it, so much of it is highlighted on my Kindle.

In the escape business, as the Amazing Randi put it, “If you are not an egotist, you are a failure.” What but a megalomaniacal brassballed self-assurance could have dragged Houdini inside a riveted boiler or to the depths of the Mississippi River? – Kennether Silverman

Molly is a person of conviction too. She just never managed to distill her convictions to a size that will fit on a t-shirt. This man had found a way around that. His t-shirt is almost the size of a billboard. – “They Tarrying Messenger” by Michael DeLuca from Clockwork Phoenix

So many kings, so few rulers. - "At The Edge of Dying", Mary Robinette Kowal, Clockwork Phoenix 2

The blazing glory of Hathirekhmet, pitiless as stone, but not cruel; cruelty implied a desire for suffing in others. Hathirekhmet did not desire. She simply was. - "Once a Goddess" by Marie Brennan from Clockwork Phoenix 2

He gave his creation a mother's love and a father's protection, a sibling's tolerance and a friend's rivalry, a teacher's admiration and an enemy's respect. - "Your Name is Eve" by Michael M. Jones from Clockwork Phoenix 3

When you touch a decomposed body that's been in the water for a while the body feels kinda, sorta good until you figure out what it is. Then it feels very bad. - Sock

Movies in January

2011-03-02T15:04:00.000-06:00

Time is short, and the list is long. The Pianist and Network: two films you don't need me to tell you are quite good. Withnail and I was strange but wonderful. I should have seen this years ago (but then the same is true of Network). The Sunshine Boys was written Neil Simon by and stars (at least the version I watched) Woody Allen and Peter Falk as a vaudeville team that can no longer stand each other but are trying to work together on one last gig. A good story and Woody and Peter are perfect.

Death at a Funeral is a perfect streaming Netflix movie. Funny enough once but I'm unlikely to watch it again.

The Royal Shakespeare Company's Hamlet starring David Tennant was quite good. I liked having Patrick Stewart play both the father and the uncle, and Hamlet cutting his palm when he swears his oath to the ghost and having the knotted bandage there to see for the next few acts, a constant reminder, very cool.

Season 1 of Rome I liked quite a lot. My only gripe is that it's just a shade too intense for my boys to watch it, which is a shame as it really brings the history to life.

I've been trying to watch more French films lately (another Netflix bonus). I quite liked OSS 117 Cairo, Nest of Spies. It's a parody of a series of films you just know Mike Myers was looking at when he was crafting Austin Powers. The lead actor is wonderful; he does smarmy so well. My favorite scene is one where he knocks back a couple of scotches in his boss's office, and then gets more than a little buzzed. It was well played, the slowly building sense that our hero isn't all there that culminates in his attempt to get down the hall. How does Bond do it? I had watched this after seeing a trailer for the sequel OSS 117 Lost in Rio because a French spy film featuring Nazi luchadores simply must be seen. Alas, it was not as sharply written as the first.

3 idiots has Aamir Khan and Vidhu Vinod Chopra joining forces to tell a story about the cruel pressures of college in India. Think Tiger Mom, times ten. An excellent film. I particularly liked all of the inventions the engineering students came up with; very clever and clearly they really work.

My Name is Khan also has a few scenes of engineering inventiveness, but mostly it's a story about how not all Muslims are bad. It also features Shah Rukh Khan as an autistic man. The filmmakers did their research, and his performance is quite good. The fact that I kept hearing Robert Downey Jr. talking about not going "full retard" is clearly just my own baggage.

Mela was apparently a box office bomb, and I'm not sure why as I found it rather fun. Aamir Khan is a traveling actor and while there's some sort of A story that involves a woman (Twinkle Khanna in I think her last role?) who needs to avenge her brother or something, there is a lovely B story between Khan and his buddy that drives the truck. They had a wonderful chemistry together. Wikipediaing later, I see that's probably because the buddy was played by Khan's real-life brother. He looks more like Salman than Aamir. But I liked him; he played a good buddy. (And I think I answered my own question there; when the most interesting thing you've got going on is your B plot, your going to bomb in the box office. But you know I'll always love you, because I'm very forgiving of crummy A plots. I'm looking at you The Last Legion. I never seem to remember you're a movie about King Arthur. Aish is so distractingly cool).

Besides being one of or the last film from Twinkle Khanna, Mela also seems to be the point in Aamir Khan's career where he decided to do movies that had some deeper value. He followed it up with Lagaan, after all. 3 idiots is a more current example. But he also produces more interesting films, such as Peepli Live, a very dark comedy indeed about farmers in rural India who discover there's money to be had in suicide. This movie is as much a critique of politicians and the media as it is about the plight of farmers. Very sharply written.

I'll finish up with two starring Ranbir Kapoor. Wake Up Sid is about a young man in danger of remaining a perpetual adolescent, and the friend that gives him just enough of a poke to get going. All of the characters in this one are well-written with good arcs (Sid has some pretty cool friends). A little more old school song and dance is Bachna Ae Haseeno, a movie that takes it's title from a song from one of Ranbir's dad's movies. A movie I've never seen, so I don't know why the song was instantly familiar to me. I must have heard it somewhere. It is quite awesome, original or remix. Love the horns. It's worth taking a look at the original on youtube just for Rishi's outfit, and the girls in go-go boots. But I digress. This is another very modern story about a young man who gets on the receiving end of rejection and looks up all the girls he's wronged to apologise. It has its moments (his best friend certainly has some interesting T-shirts). Still, for me, it's all about that song:

Books in January

2011-02-16T15:04:00.001-06:00

Wow, kind of a lot of books in January.

I though Full Metal Alchemist volume 24 was going to wrap up the series, but now I guess it's volume 25. It's definitely building to a kick-ass climax. Also, I love the Flame Alchemist. Just sayin'.

Packing for Mars by Mary Roach is certainly an approachable book about the space program (or rather programs, as she also checks out what Japan is up to). It's not nearly as detailed, been-there-done-that, or witty as R. Mike Mullane. Her witticisms often rubbed me the wrong way; individual results may vary. But honestly if you're looking for a book about the space program written for everyone, I'd go with Mullane's Do Your Ears Pop in Space?

The Atheists Guide to Christmas is a UK book with the proceeds going to charity. Simon le Bon aside, I was more familiar with the scientists (including Richard Dawkins and Brian Cox) who wrote pieces for this than the pop culture celebrity types. I'm not sure if these people are on TV or what, but several of them are quite funny. Not a particularly meaty read, but amusing enough for the dollar I paid for it.

Zero History is of course the latest by William Gibson, with a plot about the fashion industry's relationship with military uniforms. But since this is Gibson it's really about all the little details that are just spot on and wonderfully described. I guess this wraps up his trilogy of books that are set so near-future they aren't really sci-fi. I've enjoyed them, and especially the women protagonists (who meet briefly in this one, a nice scene). It should be interesting to see what he does next.

Alchemy of Stone by Katerina Sederis had a wonderful setting. The main character is a clockwork woman; her creator keeps the key that winds her up. The society seems to be split between engineers and alchemists, two world views that don't overlap much, although our main character bridges them. But as the story progresses we start to see all the people who aren't either of those things: the farmers and the miners and that. I loved the worldbuilding, but the story just seemed to zip by too quickly. I'd have loved to read this at a more China Mieville length.

Among Others is the first book I've read by Jo Walton, although I've had her name down on my writers to read next list for a long time. I adore her column at Tor.com, and this book really feels like an extension of that. It's a book about books and why and how we love them. It's about how reading sci-fi matters even in the mundane world we all live in. It's so cool that now if anyone asks me "how can you read that stuff?" I have the perfect novel to hand them. This is why. (And bonus, I now have more names for my list of writers to read next).

I also read some urban fantasy, the first two books in two different series. Spellbent and Shotgun Sorceress (how awesome is that title?) by Lucy A. Snyder are set or start out in Columbus, Ohio, and hey! I was just there! So I had that geek factor going for me. The sequel starts in Ohio, but then finds its way to a Texas town being controlled by a Japanese demoness. Cool. I have a particular fondness for books where magic has a real cost, and boy does this main character pay a price. There's a large cast of well thought out characters (I have a particular fondness for the college boys the MC rooms with very briefly, although they likely won't turn up again, they were cool).

I also read Embers and Sparks by Laura Bickle, books set in Detroit. The main character is an arson investigator by day and a swallower of ghosts by night. She also has a salamander who is always with her, making trouble. He's not exactly a pet, more like a particularly precocious toddler, capable of destroying something the instant your attention is distracted. This is another one with a large cast of diverse characters; I particularly enjoy the ghostbusting team Anya works with. They have a wide range of world views that occasionally causes conflict but they manage to stay a team; I loved that aspect. Detroit I've not been to, but a few of the settings used in these two books I'd love to see firsthand, like the abandoned train station and the old salt mines.

It's a good month that has me finding two new series to follow. Below, the somewhat random collection of quotes, culled down from a much longer list (boy do I love the highlight feature on my Kindle).

There were cameras literally everywhere, in London. So far, he’d managed not to think about them. He remembered Bigend saying they were a symptom of autoimmune disease, that state’s protective mechanisms ‘roiding up into something actively destructive, chronic; watchful eyes, eroding the healthy function of that which they ostensibly protected. – Zero History

There’s also a lot to be said for Christmas. The high spirits, good food, bringing people together are excellent things for humans. Although anyone who says it is the greatest story ever told clearly hasn’t read Watchmen. – “110 Love Street” by Catie Wilkins, from The Atheists Guide to Christmas

“Bleed to death? How?” I stood up, frowning at him. “There aren’t any major arteries –“
“Dammit, I should not have to talk you out of sticking a spoon in your eye!” - Spellbent

A girl who wore combat boots was much better qualified to dress her than the pastel-clad biddy in the pink shop, Anya decided. – Embers

Various fine young Baptist rednecks regularly kicked the shit out of him because he was half Chinese, half Jewish, and 100 percent nerd. Worse, he was fussy enough to come across as utterly gay to everyone but the actual gay kids. – Shotgun Sorceress

“What are you, anyway? Are you the Charon? The guy fishing for dead souls on the river Styx? Or is that an affectation?”
She felt his muscles tense under her arms. “How about you?” he countered. “Are you the Ishtar?”
“Of course not.”
“We all inherit pieces of things that make us what we are, whether we want them or not.” – Sparks

There are some awful things in the world, it’s true, but there are also some great books. When I grow up I would like to write something that someone could read sitting on a bench on a day that isn’t all that warm and they could sit reading it and totally forget where they were or what time it was so that they were more inside the book than inside their own head. I’d like to write like Delany or Heinlein or Le Guin. – Among Others

Movies in December

2011-01-19T19:30:00.000-06:00

Our first month with Netflix, which put way too many films at our fingertips. I was warned that it could get addictive, but I'm not worried. I only have a few times a week when I can even sit down in front of the TV, and that's all I'm expecting to do with that time anyway. It's a tight schedule I have, no possibility for cheating. I'm just enjoying all the options with the time I already have.

Like finally seeing An Affair to Remember. I already know the story from Sleepless in Seattle and from the Bollywood version of this movie (Mann). It holds up well; Cary Grant is of course awesome as hell, and the banter between him and Debra Kerr is top notch.

Oliver putting his own name in the search box brought us to the musical Oliver! with a very, very young Oliver Reed. So that's where that song came from...

The African Queen is another one I've been meaning to see since forever. I loved the little steam boat, and Humphrey Bogart and Katherine Hepburn were great.

The Maiden Heist stars Christopher Walken, Morgan Freeman and a super-buff William H. Macy as art musuem security guards who each have one specific work they adore. When a museum in Holland buys their obsessions, they turn thieves to steal what they can't live without. It's a quiet little movie, but has so many really wonderful touches about how subjective our reaction to art is. These guys can understand each other's obsession but can't quite get the focus of each other's obsessions (I love Morgan Freeman's attempt to replicate Christopher Walken's favorite painting - oh, he didn't get it at all).

Less compelling was the French film The Ultimate Heist. "Ultimate" here doesn't mean the heist to end all heists, it just means the last one. So I went in expecting one sort of film and got another. Still, Jean Reno reading a phonebook is worth watching once just to see.

Constant Gardener was about what I expected, a deserved Oscar winner but not a film I expect will be remembered much in ten years. (From my research on slums, it's my understanding that the slums of Nairobi are by far the worst place to live in the world, and this movie doesn't scratch the surface of what it's like. But then what it does show is harrowing enough).

Boondocks Season 3 was just as sharply written, just as lovingly animated, as the first two seasons. I love the way the old Peanuts cartoons' influence can be felt, especially in the music, and the intrusion of anime elements in a suburban setting always brightens my nerdy little heart. This is one of my favorite shows.

Toy Story 3 was not as good as the first two, but still a fun show. Mr. Potato Head left sans potato, making do with a tortilla, was brilliant, and the character of Ken was a great addition (they never say metrosexual, but it's implied). Some clever bits and the ending was just perfect, but the minimal influence of the original filmmakers was felt. Also finishing up a series was Shrek the Final Chapter, which also had some elements I liked (like Fiona rescuing herself, and she and Shrek sparring as a prelude to romance. Which it totally is). But on the final score, this is a series that's gone a bit past it's best by date. Time to retire it. It's a Trap!, the final of the Family Guy Star Wars parodies also feels less than fresh, although I loved the Seth Green jokes, and when Mon Mothma shows up and suddenly Leia is no longer the only woman in the galaxy. "I don't like her," she says. Yeah, that made me laugh.

Bollywood, y'all. Jawani Zindagi had pretty low production values, which was a shame because I really liked the story, about how dowries suck, and not just for women.

London Dreams had a cool premise: Amadeus done as two competing rock stars in the same band. Ajay Devgan (who was awesome as the lead in the Hindi version of Othello, Omkara) makes a delicious Salieri, and Salman Khan is the perfect choice for the never serious Amadeus. Sadly, a movie with a plot built around music and who makes it well and who doesn't needs to have really awesome music, and the songs in this one just didn't do it. The scene were Khan's character riffs on Devgan's snippet of song, playing it in several styles and improving on it a la Mozart, was good, but the songs they were performing before stadium crowds just weren't the sorts of songs that fill stadiums.

As opposed to Dabangg, which had awesome songs. Plus a sweet little love story, Salman Khan as a policeman with the universally recognized policeman's moustache, and action scenes that show just how much Salman Khan loved Sherlock Holmes and the Matrix. All that, and Malaika Arora Khan too. There was an episode of Friends where the guys were picking out the names of five celebrities they would sleep with if given the chance and their partners couldn't object because they were on the list (Ross laminates his, natch). My husband has just one name on his list: Malaika Arora Khan. And he insisted I put this song up on the blog (I was torn between this one and, well, every other song in the movie). It is a great number; Salman Khan looks like he's having all sorts of fun here.

Books in December

2011-01-12T16:30:00.000-06:00

Lots of books read in December. Alas I still didn't meet my goal of 100 books read in the year, and actually read less than 2009. In 2011 I'll have to be sure to read more graphic novels to pad my numbers.

Lots of books by Backspacers this month. Hunger by Jackie Morse Kessler has a great concept: an anorexic girl becomes the Horseman Famine. The details of being anorexic really brought this story to life, and although it was often sad there are some fun moments as well (like Kurt Cobain as Death; very cool). This feels like a standalone, but I'd love to see a whole Horseman of the Apocalypse series.

Twelfth Grade Kills by Heather Brewer finishes off the chronicles of Vladimir Todd. It's a good ending with lots of surprises, but it feels like there's more story here. Maybe Vlad will go to college.

Please Ignore Vera Dietz by AS King really got me at a gut level. Dealing with the death of a close friend on top of already dealing with high school and family issues - Vera Dietz was very really for me. Plus the writing is just top notch; this is another book on my Kindle with pages and pages of highlighted quotes. (This was all around a tough month to winnow down the quote list).

Stealing the Marbles by EJ Knapp is a great heist story with great score: the main character is aiming to steal the Elgin marbles from the British Museum so he can give them back to the Greeks. I love me a heist story, and this one had a lot of fun twists and details. This would make an awesome George Clooney movie (but an even awesomer Cary Grant one, if such a thing were possible).

Tongues of Serpents is the latest Temeraire novel from Naomi Novik, this time set in Australia. She really brought the geography to life; man, I'd love to go to Australia some day. The naval battle with the sea monsters - straightup awesome.

Two short story collections from M. Rickert: Map of Dreams has a lot of her stories that I'd originally read in FSF. They're just as engrossing the second time through. The only weak entry is actually the first piece, the title story. For me it took too long to get where I always figured it was going. But all of the stories in Holiday were darkly wonderful, and the structure of a year's cycle of a story for each holiday gave it a nice rhythm. Of course any book that ends with "The Christmas Witch" is doing something right. I don't think I've ever read a young child POV so convincingly written.

Cryoburn by Lois McMaster Bujold is the latest Miles Vorkosigan novel and doesn't disappoint. Some old characters are back, but the new ones hold their own.

A Star Shall Fall by Marie Brennan is hands-down my favorite of that series so far. It might just be the time it's set in, but when science starts to come into its own, things get very interesting for magical creatures. I really love how Haley's comet is used, and the missing days from when the calendars were corrected. Very cool.

And now some of my favorite quotes, in no particular order:

She sipped, realizing that at least when food was involved, she was able to feel. Maybe the emotion was bitter and hateful, but it was better than the vacuum she otherwise seemed to dwell in. Food was real. Everything else paled. - Hunger

I turn to the pond and eye a bright pink fish the size of my forearm shimmering his way from shadow to shadow, and I toss in the penny and make a wish. I wish for world peace, because it’s about as likely to occur as anything else I can wish for. - Please Ignore Vera Dietz

Mulling this over, Vlad wiped her lip gloss from his lips with the back of his hand. Vampires, after all, didn’t sparkle. - Twelfth Grade Kills

Hell hath no fury like a woman whose boyfriend is tied to a chair and being tortured in a dingy garage. - Stealing the Marbles

Privately, Temeraire was forced to admit that Laurence was unreasonably deadly on the subject of superstition, even though it did not make any sense, as he was equally firm on the subject of the Holy Spirit; Temeraire did not see how one could deny other spirits, when you had allowed one. - Tongues of Serpents

Some say she had a glow about her, which, it is also reasoned, is no difficulty for the devil to conjure such a thing if the CIA can make the whole world believe that Russia is no longer a threat, then certainly it is no problem for them to make a girl glow. - "Angel Face" in A Map of Dreams

“She and that Escobaran medtech she married plan to pop their second kid from the uterine replicator any day now.”
“Not cloned, eh?”
“No, it was all done the old-fashioned way, an egg and a sperm in a test tube.” - Cryoburn

The sisters themselves looked like a pair of poetic country housewives, rendered in three-foot miniature. At least until Gertrude Goodemeade advanced on him with the demeanor of an overwhelmingly friendly army sergeant. - A Star Shall Fall

Movies in November

2010-12-30T11:00:00.000-06:00

Finally I'm all caught up! Now if the same could just be said about the writing...

The Last Airbender was like a chilling wind blowing through my soul; I could feel the metaphysical frostbite and it burned, oh how it burned. How could he have gotten every single thing wrong? (Dev Patel and Shaun Toub were the one bright spot in an otherwise muddy mess of a film). I hope they aren't planning more, or at least they get a different filmmaker on board a la Harry Potter. I'd much rather see M. Night Shyamalan make another M. Night movie and not try to adapt someone else's story.

Vertigo was also a bit of a disappointment. I can see that it's technically stunning, and it has the lush look that says Hitchcock, but the story was just not doing it for me.

A classic that was just as fun as I'd hoped: The Sting with Robert Redford and Paul Newman. The boys enjoyed it as well.

Brick is the first film from The Brothers Bloom director Rian Johnson. It's a noir story set in a high school starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt. And by nior I really am talking about the story: the characters and how they speak and the plot. Film visuals usually associated with noir are almost entirely absent. That gives an interesting effect. It might be carry-over from having watched The Brothers Bloom first, but in my mind it made the movie feel very literary. I liked this less than The Brothers Bloom largely because it was noir, though. I don't have a great interest in the seedy underbelly of society, or women who use their sexuality to manipulate men. Not my cuppa tea. Still, well done.

Mulholland Drive didn't make sense to me until I read on Wikipedia that it was intended to be a pilot for a TV series, and when he couldn't sell the series he crafted an ending to make it a film. I think it had potential to be a very watchable TV show, but as a film the first two-thirds feel nothing like the last third and it was interesting but not quite complete.

College is a Buster Keaton film. Buster is a scholar who is forced to take an interest in sports to get the girl he likes to notice him. He fails at everything he tries until his girl is in peril - the film ends with Buster running across campus, pole vaulting and leaping hedges and doing everything else he's been trying to do in the early part of the film. It wasn't as funny as some of his others, but the man was a genius of physicality.

Some more Madhuri Dixit films: Ram Lakhan was notable mainly for casting Amrish Puri as the bad guy (yea!). Prahaar took a very long time to get going (the first hour of the movie is guys training in the army in far too much detail), but once the story settled itself in a neighborhood overrun with gangs strong-arming the locals, and the army major who came in town for the funeral of one of his former protegees stays to clean things up. For a Bollywood movie, this had a lot of realism (no musical numbers, no makeup on the actors, and the fight scenes were very real). It was directed by Nana Patekar, who as an actor has done some very meaty, and often quite dark, roles. I wonder why he only ever directed the one film. It wasn't great, but it was an interesting first try.

Two French films which were musicals: The Umbrellas of Cherbourg wasn't the sort of musical that features songs. It was more like the actors sing-songed the entire script. Interesting, and I liked the story, but when I hear singing I want to hear choruses and verses, not just an endless sing-song. The Young Girls of Rochefort I liked immensely. It was an old-school musical with a double love story interrupted by songs. The costumes and sets were colorful and like a window back in time. And it has Gene Kelly in it - speaking French.

The Girl Who Played with Fire I liked better than The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, if only because it had fewer scenes that made me intensely uncomfortable. I'm not sure why they recast this part for the English language version (or, quite honestly, why they had to make an English language version). I'm going to have trouble believing any other actress in this part.

Dollhouse Season 2 wrapped up that story in a semi-satisfying way. Unlike, say, Firefly, I didn't get the feeling that there was so much more story left to tell. It was an interesting concept, but I'm not sure there was enough material to carry a show. I loved Topher, though, and Victor channelling Topher was hilarious - so spot on.

Finally, a documentary about guitar players. It Might Get Loud features three generations of guitarists: Jimmy Page, the Edge and Jack White. They have three very distinct styles and approaches to music, and individually talking about what they do and why I loved. But the scenes where the three tried to jam together in my mind mainly served to drive home just how individualistic these three musicians are. I found this documentary compelling enough to watch it twice. Aside from making me want to dig my guitar back out (which would be a very bad idea - no time!), a lot of what they are saying about music applies equally well to writing. I love listening to artists of any stripe talking about their craft.

Here's the trailer, in which you see one of my favorite moments: Jack White showing you don't need to buy a guitar:

Books in November

2010-12-27T12:27:00.000-06:00

Only four books read in November (but wait until you see December...)

First off, I capped off my China Miéville marathon with his latest, Kraken. While this doesn't quite nudge Un Lun Dun off as my personal fave, it comes pretty close. Very readable prose, with such detail to the worldbuilding. I particularly like the magic-wielders who use sci-fi tropes for their magic. Who doesn't want a sonic screwdriver for a magic wand? It's so much cooler than a willow branch.

Behemoth is Scott Westerfeld's sequel to Leviathan, this time set in Istanbul. A fun read, the illustrations are quite good. All the talk of spices was making me hungry. And in the next book they are heading further east; should be interesting.

The Secret History of Moscow by Ekaterina Sedia is another book that's been around the house for ages in various To Be Read stacks. I loved the Russian details (particularly Father Frost, whom I've adored since the movie), but the story itself didn't quite suck me in as much as I'd hoped.

Drive by Daniel H. Pink also wasn't as engrossing as I'd hoped, mostly because a lot of his ideas come from Dan Ariely, and I've already read him. Not enough new here. On the other hand, if you've not read Ariely, this look at people's relationship to their work and what motivates us might be interesting (on the other, other hand, I'd really just recommend reading Ariely).

It's back to work for me; these stories don't write themselves, you know. In the meantime, a few of my favorite quotes:

Living a satisfying life requires more than simply meeting the demands of those in control. Yet in our offices and our classrooms we have way too much compliance and way too little engagement. The former might get you through the day, but only the latter will get you through the night. - Drive

She didn’t know what it was about subways – perhaps the fact that they were carved into a dark wet heart of the earth – that made them so magical. But she used to have an unshakeable conviction that they were the way to a hidden world where she could escape. – The Secret History of Moscow

“Sometimes you can’t get bogged down in the how,” Baron said. “Sometimes things happen that shouldn’t, and you can’t let that detain you. But the why? We can make headway with.” – Kraken

“My name’s not Rosencratz,” Eddie Malone said. “I wasn’t going to carry a message I didn’t understsand.” – Behemoth

Movies in October

2010-12-20T10:30:00.000-06:00

Oh, the lateness. These movies are from October, dude. Let's see what I remember...

The Secret of Kells was a so-so story told with some of the most eye-catching animation I've seen in a while. It was kind of Samurai Jack-y; very cool. I particularly loved the snow that was little Celtic knots.

Van Helsing was just as bad as everyone said it was. *Sigh*. Nice hat, though.

Koyla, Mrityudand, and Sailaab were all Madhuri Dixit movies. Koyla had Amrish Puri as the bad guy, and that's always a good choice (non-Bollywood fans would recognize him as Mola Ram in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom but I love him best as the very Bond-villain Mogambo in Mr. India. Man, he was awesome in that). These three were all pretty forgettable movies, though.

Heroes, Season 4 was their last season. As much as the show never really found its footing, never got more than mildly interesting, I have to give it props for not tanking the ending like BSG or Lost. Maybe not having an end in mind and having to wrap everything up at the last minute because you've been cancelled can be a good thing.

The Venture Brothers, Season 4, Volume 1 was, of course, awesome. Particularly the first episode, told out of sequence with a number in the corner that keeps changing value. The minute I figured out what that number meant - that was sublime. (I also like the ep when Dean discovers the world of prog rock). The boys are moving through adolescence in a convincing, often emotionally moving way. For a show that's mostly about terribly inappropriate jokes, the details of this family are rendered with great love. Yes, I'm deeply admiring of this show.

And finally, how did I love the movie The Brothers Bloom? Let me count the ways.

First off, the character names come from my all-time #1 favorite book EVAH, Ulysses. Brothers Bloom, you had me from the title.
The prologue about their childhood told in verse? Pretty much clinched it. I was in love before the credits started.
Rachel Weisz's character Penelope is so beyond awesome. She's a 30-something shut-in who collects hobbies by learning how to do things from books. (Of course I love her). She plays all these instruments, speaks all these languages, makes her own pinhole cameras - she even juggles chainsaws.
You don't have to have read anything to get the movie, but the subtle way literary references are woven through the story was just delightful. But like Bloom says, his brother constructs cons the way dead Russians write novels.
This was the movie that moved Mark Ruffalo in my mind from some guy who always looks familiar, like I've seen him in stuff, to an actor I instantly recognized. And just in time, as he's taking over the Hulk role from Ed Norton.
This movie has one of the best, most perfect kisses in it. You realize some things about Penelope that no other moment could convey so well.
The music is perfect for the scenes, too. I particularly loved the epiphany (because any movie that takes its title from a James Joyce novel has to have an epiphany) set to Cat Stevens. Man, perfection.
The nearly Harpoesque Japanese demolitions expert Bang-Bang. Pay attention; when Stephen says she only speaks "like three words of English", you can start counting her dialogue. Karaoke aside, it's exactly three, well chosen, words.
The message is pretty cool too. It certainly encapsulates my own philosophy of life.
I've watched this movie more than a dozen times since. It might just be a case of one of those movies that feels like the writer went inside my own head and created my perfect thing, but I think it's pretty near perfect.

So, on that note, here's the trailer:

Books in October

2010-11-23T18:28:00.000-06:00

October was an all China Miéville month. I re-read King Rat and Perdido Street Station, then moved on to the other books I've been dutifully buying ever since, but that got lost in my massive To Be Read stacks.

The Scar I'd started once before, but only reached the point when the pirates take the main character's ship, stopping before she even reached the floating city. Which is a shame, as that is just my sort of thing. I did like a lot of elements of this novel, and the language was China gorgeous as always, but it was a bit slow and the main character was so emotionally removed she was hard to relate to, a problem as a few random interludes aside, she was the only POV character. But the ending pulled it all together in a fantastically perfect way; I was glad I'd stuck with it this time.

Iron Council was also a bit unevenly paced for me. The beginning, with the group of city dwellers out in the wild, essentially on a quest, dying one by one: I loved that bit. And again, the ending is absolutely perfect (man, that light golem was cool), but there were other bits in between that slowed down.

Looking for Jake is a short story collection, some of which I'd read before. I particularly liked the story set in an Ikea; my boys love going to Ikea (all three of them).

Un Lun Dun is a YA novel, and edges out Perdido Street Station as my favorite. The worldbuilding is so detailed, with every chapter full of new creatures and characters doing something just a little askew - it reminded me of the first time I read Alice in Wonderland. Wonderful.

The City & The City is equal parts fantasy and a police procedural/crime story. I liked the fantasy bits, but the crime story bits not so much. I don't read much crime fiction, though. I'm sure a fan of both kinds of stories would find this novel awesome.

Kraken will be coming up in November. In the meantime, I've managed to winnow down my enormous collection of favorite China quotes to these few:

Scars are not injuries, Tanner Sack. A scar is healing. After injury, a scar is what makes you whole. - The Scar

In Spiral Jacob’s eyes Ori saw real derangement, a dark sea of loneliness, cold, liquor and drugs. But thoughts still saw there, cunning as barracuda, their movements the twitchings of the tramp’s face. - The Iron Council

They laid tracks on ground just smooth enough for their passage, on ties just strong enough, just close enough together. It was a just-railroad, existing in the moment for the train to pass, then gone again. - The Iron Council

The disease incubates for up to three years, during which time the infected patient suffers violent headaches. After this, full-blown Buscard’s Murrain is manifested in slowing failing mental faculties and severe mood swings between three conditions: near full lucidity; a feversigh seeking out of the largest audience possible, and a state of loud, hysterical glossolalia. Samuel Buscard infamously denoted these states torpor, prefatory, and grandiloquent respectively, thereby appearing to take the side of the disease. - from “Entry Taken from a Medical Encyclopaedia” in Looking for Jake

I will not call them evil. They are not evil. But I am afraid that they are capable of it. - from "Different Skies” in Looking for Jake

“Is it dangerous? Hmmm. Well, define ‘dangerous’. Is a knife ‘dangerous’? Is Russian roulette ‘dangerous’? Is arsenic ‘dangerous’?” He did the little finger-thing to show quotation marks, tickling the air. “It depends on your perspective.”
“I don’t think it does depend on perspective,” said Deeba. “I think that’s all definitely dangerous. I don’t think you need none of this...” She did the quote motion. - Un Lun Dun

“The thing is,” Deeba said, eying Mr. Speaker, “you could only make words do what you want if it was just you deciding what they mean. But it isn’t. It’s everyone else, too. Which means you might want to give them orders, but you aren’t in total control. No one is.” - Un Lun Dun

He walked with equipoise, possibly in either city. Schrödinger’s pedestrian. - The City & The City

Movies in September

2010-11-22T10:26:00.002-06:00

What with going to the World Fantasy Convention and trying to wind one book down while also winding another book up has been a bit of a time suck. But as I'm getting dangerously close to being three months behind, let's play a little catch-up. Luckily, September was a light movie month.

Lost Season 6, the finale. *Sigh* Well, for me this was a bit like Harry Potter. I adored those books, read them over and over again, hoarded clues and constructed my own ideas about how it would all tie up in the end, spent so much time on it and finessed what was to me such a perfect ending that book 7 was horribly disappointing. But not as disappointing as the last episode of Lost. This one face-planted just at the end worse than Battlestar Galactica. I prefer the ending in my head; I'm going to pretend that's what it all was (my ending didn't leave a decorative fringe of loose ends, I tell you).

Shutter Island was way cool. I think we can label this the point where I started noticing Mark Ruffalo. Remember it; he's going to come up again (an intriguing choice for Bruce Banner/the Hulk. It almost makes up for tossing Ed Norton. Not quite, but almost).

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, in Swedish, natch. It made me grateful I hadn't read the book; women as victims is too uncomfortable-making for me and I barely made it through a few key scenes in the movie. I'm guessing the Finch version will be intense as well, although how any other actress could play the main character after this one so thoroughly defined it, and an unknown actress at that... I think they might have made a mistake there, but we'll wait and see.

Pukar I watched, but I'm having a hard time recalling it now. I'm remembering only really liking the songs, which were by AR Rahman, so no duh. Whatever Anil Kapoor and Madhuri Dixit were up to is gone from mind now. Dream Girl is one from the late 60s or early 70s, with Dharmadendra and Hema Malini, whom I adore. This one had a song and dance number in Disney World, including an aerial shot of the park, which was mindblowing. There was nothing out there, just empty space around the Magic Kingdom.

Superman Returns I mostly remember as the movie where one lapdog ate another. The boys liked this one, and Kevin Spacey was a fun Lex Luthor, but the constant playing with the Superman as Jesus theme was tedious and the whole movie was just plain slow.

Finishing up with two Alfred Hitchcock movies: Dial M for Murder was apparently originally a 3D movie, but none of the 3D prints exist anymore. Which is a real shame; it looks like it was a gorgeous, layered popup book of a movie (as opposed to the shit poking out at you that 3D tends to devolve to in most films). Mr. and Mrs. Smith has no connection to the Brad Pitt/Angelina Jolie film. It's about two people who discover that they were never legally married, and the wife decides that suits her fine, and her husband stalks her in a screwball comedy kind of way. People behaving badly tends not to tickle my personal funny bone (I'm looking at you, The Hangover), so I didn't really enjoy this, but it does have some wonderful shots that let you know it's still Hitchcock at the helm.

Well, that finishes off September. Hopefully I'll get the two October posts up before December hits, in all it's too much to do, too little time glory.

Books in September

2010-10-14T18:22:00.000-05:00

Not much fiction read in September, and what I read was all Joe Hill. I mentioned his short story collection in August, which I liked, but the novels are even better. Wonderfully constructed with complex (often surprisingly loveable) main characters and endings that manage to slip into that narrow sliver where the circles of "didn't see it coming" and "satisfying happy ending" coincide.

Heart-Shaped Box is already being adapted into a movie with Neil Jordan as director. I can't wait to see it; his gorgeous use of color and all-around visual sense with this story where reality keeps getting all nightmarish and twisty, is going to be very interesting indeed.

But Horns was the novel I liked the best of the two. The way the story unfolded, and little bits of the past coming to life in a completely organic way, I thought it was just about perfect. And I loved the ending (and the double meaning to the title).

In nonfiction, I read another by Dan Ariely, The Upside of Irrationality. His previous book was almost a downer with its arguments that as much as people would like to be, we just aren't always rational. This book makes a nice companion: yes, we're not always rational, but there are ways to make irrationality work for you. Not as meaty as his first book, but still a good read.

And still doing novel research, Anger, Madness and the Daimonic by Stephen A. Diamond turned out not to be useful at all for my current novel purposes, but very eyeopening to some of the thematic elements in my last work. Outside of my own writing, it was a very interesting book that made me want to dive back in to my Carl Jung collection, and expand it. So many books, so little time.

People of the Lie by M. Scott Peck reminded me of a certain episode of Frasier, where he is backing a political candidate he really likes, until he finds out that the man is convinced he was abducted by aliens. I felt the same disconnect here, with how much I was right there with him in the realm of psychology, and how vast the chasm between us was when he started using words like "evil" and "Satan". Such is life.

This month's quotes, all from the fiction:

If hell was anything, it was talk radio – and family. Heart-Shaped Box

Horror was rooted in sympathy, after all, in understanding what it would be like to suffer the worst. Heart-Shaped Box

Talking to her now was like flailing his hands at a storm of hornets, It did nothing, and it stung, and yet he couldn’t stop himself. - Horns

Another story up!

2010-09-30T18:14:00.002-05:00

I'm down to only three stories still looking for homes. It's nice to have all the sales, but it also means I really need to write more. Novels are so time-consuming.

The story is called "Tale of a Fox" and is up at Fly in Amber. Here is my little blurb about it from my website:

This is yet another story written for a contest at Backspace. The parameters were to write a story based, however loosely, on a song. The song I chose was "Shiki No Uta", the song that plays over the closing credits of the anime Samurai Champloo. The title means "Song of Four Seasons", although my story really only hits on three. I had wanted to write a story for some time that was set in Japan, and specifically that included a kitsune and an onmyoji. I hope to write more onmyoji stories in the future; I love the intricacies of Heian era Japan.

On the Importance of Naming: Asuka means "fragrance of the bright day" which I thought was just lovely. Masuyo means "to increase the world" which sums up his ambition well. Katashi means firmness, which I found very appropriate for him.

Books in August

2010-09-08T15:25:00.000-05:00

In August I finished off the last volumes of Full Metal Alchemist, namely 13-23. I have 24 on preorder, but it's not out until January. I'm not sure if that will be the last or second to last, but it definitely feels like the story is coming to an end. It's so different from the anime series and movie I don't know what's going to happen next, but it's awesome.

Tamas by Bhisham Sahni is a novel set in the Partition, when Pakistan became a separate country from India with much religious rioting. I've read nonfiction books on the subject which were deeply upsetting, and I've seen more than a few Bollywood movies that were set at that time, or dealt with the fallout of it all (often a bit too shrilly overdramatic). In comparison, this novel written by someone who lived through it all, feels very emotionally remote. It's a good story and feels real, just muted.

Speaking of nonfiction, I picked up the book version of a DVD I've been working through when I can find the time (so, not often), Taijiguan, Classical Yang Style by Yang, Jwing Ming. I like Yang's writing, we actually have quite a few of his other books and I delve into them from time to time. Learning the form is probably much easier with the DVD than with the pictures in the book, but the book has a lot more information on the hows and whys as well as the history. Someday I'll have enough time to really devote to this, right?

Another nonfiction I picked up as possible novel #5 research, American Exorcism by Michael Cuneo. It wasn't quite what I needed for what I'm thinking of for novel #5, but was interesting in it's own right and I read the whole thing in two afternoons. Cuneo (who describes himself in a way I could also describe myself, as an open-minded sceptic) looks into exorcisms, both the old school Catholic and the kind done by Pentecostals and Evangelicals, also spending some time on the Satanic scares of the early 80s, something I remember happening from my childhood years and was tremendously interesting to put into a larger context.

I also finished off my Cory Doctorow kick with his last two novels, Makers, which I actually found a bit depressing (for its near future in which no one has any financial security or job stability), and For the Win, which has displaced Little Brother as my favorite Doctorow. FTW is set mainly in Mumbai and China, where kids are put to work in sweat shops playing videogames to rack up megacharacters and win all the rare prizes to be sold to lazy gamers in the US and elsewhere. The plot centers on these kids getting organized, getting unionized, across national boundaries (and joining forces with all the other exploited workers of Asia). Lots of ideas about workers and economics, with details that put you right there in the heat, smelling the food, hearing the roar of the computer fans. I'd highly recommend that one; I think Doctorow is at his best when he's writing YA.

I've had Joe Hill's books on my shelf for quite some time now, gifts from two Christmases ago plus his new one which I picked up when it came out. It seemed like a good time to dig into them now (yeah, I don't know why, sometimes I just get these urges). I started off with his short story collection 20th Century Ghosts, which was engrossing as hell. Clever stories with marvellously complicated characters, what's not to love? Here's a little taste of Books in September: his novels are even better.

Banto again fell silent. Argument can counter argument, but argument is helpless against faith. -
Bhisham Sahni

What Aunt Mandy would say about it is that she's still trying to figure out what it is she's supposed to be. What my father would say is Mandy is wrong if she thinks the question hasn't been answered yet - she already is the person she was always sure to become. - Joe Hill

Movies in August

2010-08-31T15:27:00.003-05:00

I caught a lot of movies on cable this month; I'm not sure how that worked out. I saw the original Jane Fonda version of Fun with Dick and Jane, which made me wonder how badly the Jim Carrey/Tea Leone version would screw up its lowkey vibe. I'm afraid to find out. Dickie Roberts, Former Child Star was amusing, although not in the way that would be worth seeing twice. We Were Soldiers could have been the Vietnam War version of Band of Brothers, only it wasn't. I found it oddly not emotionally engaging at all.

Cop Out was directed by Kevin Smith, but not written by him. It's very obvious; it does not have any of his wit. I found the characters likeable, but there just weren't any jokes (unless you count the tagline on the DVD cover: "Rock out with your Glock out", which gave me a chuckle). Rope was our latest Alfred Hitchcock movie, and we enjoyed it. We always play Find Alfred, but for this one we also go to play Find the Hidden Cuts. It was seamlessly done, something all too easy to pull off with computers these days. There was a point when the camera followed the actors down the hall to the kitchen when it became clear that SteadiCams hadn't been invented yet, and yet it was no where near as jarring as that keeping-it-real hurky-jerky handheld camera stuff which got so popular a few years back (we hates it; it's distracting as hell). I liked his use of color too, and the cityscape looming out the window. Lastly in the category of films in English, Cold Souls, which stars Paul Giamatti as Paul Giamatti. It did feel like Being John Malkovich in a lot of ways, but it was a quieter story. Paul is working in a production of Uncle Vanya, but the angst of the play is getting to him, so he decides to let a new company remove his soul just until he's done with the play. But that has side effects and he quickly wants it back, only to find it's been stolen. He follows the trail to Russia, which has a burgeoning trade in taking the souls of Russian workers and selling them to Americans. The moment when he finds out who has his soul and what she's been using it for is priceless. A small but interesting film.

On to Bollywood then. New York is about the fallout of 09/11. John Abraham is an architecture student who is picked up for having pictures of the WTC on his camera after 9/11 and spends weeks or months held in an undisclosed location. When he's finally released, he vows revenge. Which to me, speaking in terms of story not legal definitions, doesn't exactly make him a terrorist; he's getting back at the people who specifically harmed him, the same as Mel Gibson would if you hurt his daughter, you know? The element of the story which I found most interesting, when he tries and then fails to reintegrate in society before deciding on revenge, is glossed over in a musical montage, and Katerina Kaif's character is criminally underused (there is a scene where she and Abraham are walking in Central Park and pass two randowm policemen and he starts to panic, but she holds his hand and walks him past the cops with such a fierce look in her eye; why couldn't the movie have had more of that?). Also the happy ending that comes out of nowhere feels really false; it relied on the three remaining characters having no real emotions about everything that just happened in the climactic scene and I felt a bit betrayed. This could have been a really good film but I'm afraid they flubbed it.

I had better luck with Wanted, another Salman Khan film which I had heard nothing but negative things about. Yes, it's a bit silly, another story of a cop undercover, the loose canon type who gets the job done never mind the risks or rules (Hollywood has plenty of those as well). I will agree that while the female lead is charming enough in her acting scenes, she can clearly just barely dance. I say this with great love, but it's an odd film where Salman Khan is your best dancer. But then this is not that film; Govinda turns up just long enough...

Aladin had Amitabh Bachchan as the genie of the lamp and Sanjay Dutt as a magician called the Ringmaster (he seemed to call himself that largely for one joke at the expense of a Chinese man). It was fun but not awesome. Kisna was an epic story set in the last days of British rule. It involved an Indian boy in love with a white girl, with the theme that duty comes before love. I felt bad for the Indian girl Kisna eventually married out of duty. I bet she had a fun life. Mehbooba was gorgeous with extravagant sets and the really big kind of song and dance numbers. I didn't really care for the ending here either, but at least the first three hours were entertaining.

Better was Lajja, a story about women and how society treats them. Which sounds preachy as hell, but this movie pulls all the tricks out of the bag (great dances, spot-on comic relief, a few really heroic male characters who get into fights but not ones which drag on forever) to make for a highly watchable movie which just also happens to have a message. Having seen Sita sings the Blues, the scene where Madhuri Dixit takes Sita to task for letting herself be tested by fire while performing her part in a play was awesome (it's a bit like someone playing Jesus in a passion play deciding to go off script and not get up on the cross, telling the audience they can all handle their own sins, thank you very much, and stop looking for scapegoats). This was from the same director as the very first Bollywood movie I saw: Andaz Apna Apna. I'd be hard pressed to come up with two more different films...

Movies in July

2010-08-25T07:58:00.000-05:00

In July I got myself another big box of Bollywood movies. But first the non-Bolly.

Ocean's 11, the original Frank Sinatra version. The first half was aimless, the actual heist was better, but the ending was just depressing. The boys enjoyed this mostly as a glimpse to what Vegas used to look like (four casinos on a stretch of road, never out of sight of the desert, basically).

Speaking of George Clooney (well, we were inferring him above, yeah?), Confessions of a Dangerous Mind pretty much clinched my opinion that Clooney directs some great stories. Also, Sam Rockwell is awesome in everything. This movie was very strange but very interesting.

I finally saw Treasure of the Sierra Madre, and it has not been overpraised. Humphrey Bogart slowly losing it over a couple of sacks of gold dust is completely mesmerising.

The Warlords is a Jet Li movie that reminded me a bit of Scarface in that it involves a bunch of guys acting all gangsta until their entire world collapses around them. A cautionary tale. It also has Takeshi Kaneshiro, whom I saw recently in Red Cliff. Then I looked him up on Wikipedia and realized I'd seen him in all sorts of things from House of Flying Daggers to Chunking Express, so I'm a bit embarrassed it took me this long to really notice him. I like him; he's one of those actors who listens really well (giving speeches is easy; reacting to another actor giving a speech is much tougher to do in a captivating way, I'm thinking).

When the boys were at camp I went out to the movie theater twice, to see Inception and Salt. Inception is just as cool as everyone but the haters says it is. I also quite liked Salt, too. What a perfect name for a popcorn movie. Liev Schreiber seems to finally be getting lots of interesting work, which is cool.

One of the blogs I followed was on about Aguirre: The Wrath of God, only I can't remember which one. (Jerry Coyne?) At any rate, it's a strange movie that reminded me of a lot of other movies, only when I looked it up later it turns out it's actually a strange movie that inspired a lot of other movies. An interesting film, although not one I'm likely to watch again.

And then comes Bollywood: God Tussi Great Ho was just as bad as I had heard. It's the Bollywood version of Bruce Almighty starring Amitabh Bachchan as god, which sounds like it could be cool. Oliver watched this one with me, and when Salman Khan's character meets god for the first time, Oliver wondered how he knew which god it was. One of many potentially interesting questions the movie doesn't ask. The special effects were unbelievably hokey, but apparently ate the whole budget, as it looked like it'd been shot on video and not film. Plus, the songs weren't even any good.

Kambakkht Ishq is set in Hollywood and has appearances by Sylvester Stallone and Denise Richards plus that guy who's Justin Long's boyfriend in Zack and Miri Make a Porno. Sadly, it was one of those movies where the script was writing itself while they filmed, I'm guessing - silly and nonsensical and not very good. But Akshay Kumar is likeable even in crap films, and the title song is groovy:

Paa was interesting, with Amitabh Bachchan as a 12-year-old with progeria and his son Abhishek Bachchan playing his father. Abhishek's character is a politician trying to make a point about how politics doesn't have to equal corruption. Sadly, his whole plot line was dumped in the end, and I really wanted to see how all that came out.

Drona also stars Abhishek Bachchan playing a superhero who's really a mythological figure (think Thor, only he has a really shiny magic sword). He's also more laconic than Batman. The Big Bad in this one would have been creepier without the Ed Grimley hair-do. This wasn't really a great film, but I liked their story.

Veer I had heard was a bad film, and I went into it with low expectations, so low I was actually working on something else when I put it in and wasn't really reading the subtitles, just getting by on what little I could pick up by listening. By the end of the first dance number, I was completely sucked in and left my work undone to watch the next two hours. This movie is probably just as lovingly researched and historically accurate as, say, Troy. It's also as bombastic and fun as Troy, with one on one combat with swords and shields in front of massive city walls. It might be too lowbrow for the critics, but I loved it. Here's the first number which got my attention; check out all the little elements that make this so almost a Viking scene (like the big vat they keep filling their beer mugs from, and that carved pillar in the middle of the room):

Books in July

2010-08-18T07:59:00.001-05:00

In my head, July was a month where I did nothing but write, write, write until I finished the rewrite on the novel. But apparently I was reading quite a bit as well. I remember the books, but I don't remember finding the time to read them. Writing warps my mind that way, I think.

In the world of, um, sequential art (OK, manga and comic books), I read volumes 7-12 of Full Metal Alchemist, which I love more and more the less it's like the anime series I've already watched three times. This story is so seriously cool. Perhaps I love it so much because as soon as I finish a volume I hand it off to Oliver and he devours it and then we geek out about it together. Good times.

I also finally picked up the Alan Moore I got with my Christmas money, volumes 3-5 of Promethea, which I think is my favorite of his. I can qualify that, it might not be my favorite story of his, but it's definitely my favorite art. It's just gorgeous (although the story and themes rock too). I also read two The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, namely The Black Dossier and Century:1910. It's like the coolest fan fiction ever, weaving in all the great fictional characters. But I've been getting less of that vibe as I go and the story moves more into modern times, and I'm beginning to wonder where he's going with all this.

I read one nonfiction book, the very interesting Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely. The book came out just as the subprime shit was going down, and the edition I read had some appendices where he discusses just how much what he was saying in the first place was borne out by everything that happened. It's just a shame he didn't get heard sooner. Apparently economics is driven by economists who believe that everyone behaves rationally when it comes to money, and that's something we can depend on, can take as a constant when doing the math, so to speak. This book is about how that is sadly just not true, with lots of examples from experiments he's done, although once he's stated his point it feels so intuitive it's hard to believe anyone could think otherwise.

I happened to read that book after it came up on Boing Boing, which is as good a segue as I'm going to get to Cory Doctorow. I've previously read Little Brother, which was teh awesome. In July I read his first two novels Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom is set in a far off future where there is no reason to work since no one needs anything, but the economy is based on reputation so everyone is always looking to do something cool, like super-geek-out Disney World rides. A fun read, especially if you love Disney World (I do). Eastern Standard Tribe was darker, twisted and funny. Having since read a few more Doctorow, I would say his themes are generally variations of the conflict between those who make, and those who want to control what is made. Which I find terribly interesting, if at times almost depressing when it seems like a losing battle (more on that in Books in August).

Lots of Backspacers with new books out, which is always cool. Only the Good Spy Young by Ally Carter is a great next volume in the series. The plot thickens, the stakes get higher, new facets of some characters are revealed. I love this series.

Shades of Gray by Jackie Kessler and Caitlin Kittredge is also a sequel, although this to me feels more like the middle volume of a trilogy than another of a long series. It had that The Empire Strike Back kind of feel to it, anyway. The world building goes deeper, the characters form the sort of strange of-necessity alliances that are always the coolest thing in comics. I've waited forever for a cool novel about superheroes, and this and its predecessor are exactly what I longed for.

Moving out of genre to literary, I read Kings of the Earth by Jon Clinch. If Amazon.com wants to pull a 1984 a pull this back off my reader, I'm pretty well covered since I underlined almost all of it anyway. Yes, the language is that perfect. Every sentence demands to be read aloud. But I particularly loved the nonlinear sequence spread over multiple characters. First we're in 1990 and then we're in 1931. We're in Audie's head, then we're in his brother's, or his nephew's. There's not a thread that's being followed, at first it seems all over the place. It reminded me of when I was a kid doing one of those pictures you paint with water. I used to like to get the brush as wet as possible, then hold it over the page and let big, fat drops fall on a few different points of the picture. Then I'd watch as the drops spread, making the blues, reds and greens come to life, bringing out more and more of the picture until they started to spread into each other, to connect and eventually cover the page. The plot of this reveals itself like that. It was hypnotic, I couldn't stop reading it. Remember what I said above, about not remembering reading these books? Well this one I do remember, because I devoured it all in a day, accidentally clocking extra miles on the treadmill because I wasn't paying attention, serving dinner late because I was cooking with one hand and holding the Kindle in the other (and I need two hands to underline - sorry, dinner!).

Now I'm not sure what happened but some of the books seemed to have lost their underlining on my Kindle. Not sure how that happened (Kings of Earth is happily unaffected), so my closing quotes are a bit skimpy this go around:

Wouldn't economics make a lot more sense if it were based on how people actually behave, instead of how they should behave? - Dan Ariery

The side of the refigerator was mossy. The man from Syrcuse said his Boy Scout training must be failing him because he'd been given to understand that moss grew on the north sides of trees and this was the east. One of the troopers suggested that maybe the conventional wisodm didn't apply to iceboxes. - Jon Clinch

It is very hot, and I am turning the color of the Barbie aisle at FAO Schwartz, a kind of labial pink that is both painful and perversely cheerful. - Cory Doctorow (Eastern Standard Tribe)

Movies in June

2010-07-31T16:04:00.000-05:00

Not much seen in June. Novel writing will do that to you. At any rate, I caught Quills, starring Geoffrey Rush as the Marquis de Sade. I've met writers who insist that they have to write, that if they don't write they will go mad. In this movie, de Sade is the extreme of that sort of writer. (I'm not that sort of writer. I love to write, but when life gets too busy and I don't do it, I don't go mad.) I liked the movie up until the final scene. There was no part of the conclusion that I was buying; it was like every single character did a complete 180.

Good Night, and Good Luck I've been meaning to see for a while. It was interesting, and visually gorgeous. Smoking in black and white movies just looks so moody and cool. As far as movies about the McCarthy era go, I would put this just after Woody Allen in The Front. Good movie, but without the rewatchability that The Front has.

Easy Virtue was amusing in parts, but a little too much a movie version of a play. Some of the dialogue sounded awfully artificial, particularly Jennifer Biel's dialogue. Not her fault, I think the playwright was using her character as the speaker of his philosophical ideas. I did like the use of music, music from the 20s but also modern songs redone as if they were from the 20s, and it's hard to go wrong with anything with Colin Firth.

And in the world of Cary Grant, we caught The Philadelphia Story, which is just marvellous. James Stewart makes the world's cutest drunk, and he and Grant and Katherine Hepburn are perfect together (sharply written dialogue helps).

Matador was another movie I wasn't sure what to make of from Pedro Almodovar. I do believe this is Antonio Banderas' first movie; he certainly looks puppy-young. There were a lot of likeable moments, but also a lot of disturbing ones and I'm not sure they sat together happily in my mind. I might have been too tired to watch this the night I put it in, though.

Lastly I watched the DVD Doctor Who, the Specials, filling in the gaps between the last series I caught on DVD and the one I've been watching on BBC America. The boys watched these too. "The Waters of Mars" in particular had a big impact on them (Oliver watched large chunks of it from between his fingers).

Books in June

2010-07-27T16:05:00.001-05:00

I finally got around to reading the Full Metal Alchemist manga (by Hiromu Arakawa) I bought after watching the anime show. I read volumes 1-6 in June, and so far the show follows the manga pretty closely. I understand it's when Greed enters the picture that the two stories diverge.

After having read The Gangs of New York, I picked up another collection of New York anecdotes by Herbert Asbury, All Around the Town. These are not strictly about gangs and gangsters and some of the stories are quite amusing, like the breakdown in what it took to be a fashionable lady in the post Civil War period. Expensive, and a little on the ouch side.

Another nonfiction book I read was the latest from Ayaan Hirisi Ali, Nomad. I was sucked in with her life story in her last book, and here she has more reflections, about what everything she went through taught her, and how the western world should handle immigrants from the Muslim world in particular. A very thought-provoking read.

It sort of worked out that I ended up reading two books dealing with female genital mutilation. It's something that Ali went through, and it appears as a major plot point in Nnedi Okorafor's Who Fears Death. I loved this book, it deals with a lot of dark material but in the end has a feeling of pragmatic optimism about the future. There is wonderful worldbuilding here, and complex characters. I'd highly recommend this one, a great read.

Lastly, another book I finally got around to is the English translation of Saratchandra Chattopadhyay's Devdas. Having seen two film versions (of the dozens in various languages made), I can now say that the Dilip Kumar version does follow the book (novella, really) more closely, but nothing can match the visual splendor of Sanjay Leela Bhansali's version. He may have deviated from some details, but I think he got the soul of the book up on the screen. It's one beautiful bummer of a story.

And now back to my so nearly done novel. I'll leave you with a few of my favorite quotes:

He said first that since he resembled Queen Anne to such a remarkable degree, he occasionally donned skirts and paraded the streets solely that he might acquaint the colonists with the appearance of their sovereign, whom none of them would probably ever see. This explanation didn't seem to satisfy anybody, so His High Mightiness said that he sometimes dressed as a woman simply because he was the New World representative of the Queen, and he though that the people should be reminded from time to time that they were ruled by a woman. Colonial eyebrows were still lifted, so Lord Cornbury finally announced with considerable dignity that he had made a vow which compelled him to wear dresses one month each year. And if that wasn't sufficient for the citizens, he implied, they could concoct a few explanations of their own. - Herbert Asbury

To be something abnormal meant that you were to serve the normal. And if you refused, they hated you... and often the normal hated you even when you did serve them. - Nnedi Okorafor

It is the custom of the wise and the cautious not to pronounce judgment on anything hastily, or to jump to conclusions without considering the full implications of the matter. But there are human beings who are the exact opposite. They do not have the patience to reflect over anything or follow a matter through to its logical end. On the spur of the moment they decide that a thing is either good or bad. They make faith do the work of thorough soul searching. It isn't that such people aren't cut out for the world - in fact they often work out very well. If luck is with them, they can often be found at the pinnacle of success. But if luck doesn't favour them, they can be found in the deepest dregs of misery, wallowing in its murky depths, unable to get up, to rise above their circumstances. There they lie like lifeless, inanimate objects. Devdas belonged to this class of men. - Saratchandra Chattopdhyay

All human beings are equal, but all cultures and religions are not. - Ayaan Hirisi Ali

Movies in May

2010-06-27T16:29:00.000-05:00

First off, a slew of Charlie Chaplin shorts: Sunnyside I don't really remember. Hot Finish had car racing and Chapin in a villain role. Pretty cool. The Immigrant was wonderful, starting on a rolling ship at sea and ending in New York in an awkward money situation in a restaurant. The Adventurer had some fun chases and a repeated gag of jumping from a second floor balcony. The Cure had the best drunk :run up the stairs always almost but not quite falling" I've ever seen, followed by a few "I feel like I'm still in the revolving door" spins. The man was a physical genius, no doubt about it. Easy Street about life in the slums was a good one as well.

One Bollywood movie: Izzat ki Roti. I'm only remembering flashes of it now, and I'm fairly certain I fell asleep before the end. I think it was another one of those where the whiplash changes from zany comedy to bloody violence just lost me.

All About my Mother by Pedro Álmodovar I really loved. It has such a big heart and shows so many complex but ultimately accepting family relationships. It was very sweet, in a good way.

The Imaganarium of Dr. Parnassus was The Awesome. Colin Farrel, Jude Law and especially Johnny Depp stepped in for Heath Ledger so wonderfully the film was almost an homage to him. But even outside of Heath, the wagon that transforms into a stage, the strange world behind that stage, everything was so cool. And every film I see Verne Troyer in, I love him just a little bit more. He makes a great foil for Dr. Parnassus here.

Kiss Kiss Bang Bang I've been meaning to see, oh, since it came out in theaters. It was fun, with lots of great lines. Kilmer and Downey should totally do another buddy film together; they have great chemistry. (Now I'm wondering who Downey doesn't have great chemistry with...)

And a few biopics with lots of song and dance numbers: Beyond the Sea about Bobby Darin and De-Lovely about Cole Porter. They were both good. I'm going to score Beyond the Sea a touch higher for its use of music, but De-Lovely tops for story. Of course Darin died young, and Porter lived at least three lifetime's worth. Another version of Cole Porter's story was Night and Day with Cary Grant. A little less edgy (or true to life) than De-Lovely, but it's hard to beat anything when it has Cary Grant in it.

One more biopic I caught on cable, Valentino. This thing started at 11:30 at night and I stayed up to see it all the way to the end, and that's saying something. It had a strange quality to the directing, almost Gilliam-esque in places, but was interesting. Which reminded me that I've never really seen a Valentino movie all the way through...

Books in May

2010-06-24T12:27:00.000-05:00

In May I wrapped up the last of the Bronte novels. Villette by Charlotte Bronte dragged a lot in the beginning, then got very engrossing near the end. I'm going to have to tackle all of her books again some day after I've learned a little French; she puts entire paragraphs in French and doesn't translate. A sentence or two I can guess the gist, but whole paragraphs? Emily Bronte only ever wrote Wuthering Heights, which I read back in my teens. It's a tickle to read it again post-Jasper Fforde. Anne Bronte was apparently the religious one of the three; Agnes Grey comes across to me as very moralizing. The Tenant of Wildfell Hall I liked better. You'd think a novel about the long-suffering wife of a narcissist alcoholic (and possible heroin fiend) would have even more heavy-handed moralizing than the story of a governess in charge of a bunch of ingrates, but I actually found it very human and with a still-contemporary feel.

After all that reading of books more than a century old, I gorged on new releases from some of my faves. The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ by Philip Pullman... well, what can I say? My Kindle version is underlined like crazy now, this book had so much wonderful writing in it. Victory of Eagles by Naomi Novik is the latest Tremeraire novel. I liked it better than the last, which I felt wandered too much. This one has a stronger, more relentless plot: Napoleon invades England and the British army is driven back to Scotland. And the next book is set in Australia: I'm geeked already.

Helpless by MJ Pearson was all kinds of awesome. Oscar Wilde's trial makes the perfect backdrop for this story about the love that dares not speak its name, in this case a love triangle where someone is not to be trusted, but which one? And since this is Pearson, the historical details are delightful and perfect, and the secondary characters are rich and often laugh out loud funny. I had to wait awhile for this one to come out, but it was worth it.

Still reading about writing: Word Work by Bruce Holland Rogers was a fun read, more about process and lifestyle than about the mechanics. Rogers is one of my favorite short fiction writers, and the only short-short writer I consistently like; getting a little glimpse into how he approaches writing was enlightening. More work, but worth it, was The Rhetoric of Fiction by Wayne C. Booth. It took me a few months to get throught it, but mostly because there were so much here I needed to stop and let it soak in, really think about it. Anyone interested in the old show vs. tell debate, particularly if you like me are a bit cynical about rules cut in stone, I highly recommend this book to you.

And lastly, Hindi: An Essential Grammar by Rama Kant Agnihotri. A nice overview. Grammar, like math, I find I understand best if I have multiple people explain it from their own unique perspective (in case you're wondering why this seems like the fourth or fifth Hindi grammar I've read in the last year). This is thorough and points are clearly explained, but it's meant to be used in a classroom with a teacher; hence, none of the exercises have answers. So for the self-taught, I'm afraid RS McGregor is still the best bet.

And now for a few of my favorite quotes from the month:

No mockery in this world ever sounds to me so hollow as that of being told to cultivate happiness. What does such advice mean? Happiness is not a potato, to be planted in mould, and tilled with manure. - Charlotte Bronte, Villette

I'm part of the world, and I love every grain of sand and blade of grass and drop of blood in it. There might as well not be anything else, because these things are enough to gladden the heart and calm the spirit; and we know they delight the body. - Philip Pullman

And here am I, my hands red with blood and shame and wet with tears, longing to begin telling the story of Jesus, and not just for the sake of making a record of what happened: I want to play with it; I want to give it a better shape; I want to knot the details together neatly to make patterns and show correspondences, and if they weren't there in life, I want to put them there in the story, for no other reason than to make a better story. - Philip Pullman

"...he just doesn't talk much. He can, of course, he's not dumb or dumb, if you get my meaning, he just doesn't say much. But when he does-"
Douglas was amused. "It's bound to be wise and profound?"
"Oh no, absolute drivel, usually."
Donnie rolled his eyes and spoke at last. "Orange," he said. - MJ Pearson

He seldom deigned to notice me; and, when he did, it was with a certain supercilious insolence of tone and manner that convinced me he was no gentleman; though it was intended to have the contrary effect. - Anne Bronte, Agnes Grey

"It is I who left them," was the smiling rejoinder. "I was wearied to death with small talk - nothing wears me out like that. I cannot imagine how they can go on as they do." - Anne Bronte, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall

What meaning would it have to say to Joyce that he has asked for "too much" cryptoanalysis in Finnegans Wake? Too much for you and me, perhaps, and we may find ourselves ultimately repudiating, on moral grounds, an author who excludes practically everyone. But not too much for Finnegans Wake. Who would bother about Finnegans Wake at all if it were not packed with Finneganswakism? - Wayne C. Booth

"Where does he live?" Temeraire asked, interrupting; he felt that anyone who did not have time for politics must be rather sensible. - Naomi Novik

Fantastical Visions V Update

2010-06-14T15:46:00.002-05:00

My second short story sale was to Fantastical Visions V, an anthology from Fantasist Enterprises. They are currently doing a fundraiser to raise the money to get the publishing process started (damn you, economic downturn!). It works like public television: the more you contribute, the nicer the thank-you gift. All the details are on the Kickstarter page. I've also added a widget to this blog page to track how we're doing towards the goal.

The story I have in this anthology is one of my favorites of my early works, a sword and sorcery type fantasy tale where the magic is based on string theory. I intended it to be the first of three stories, with the second set in the present and the third in the future. Of course that's the thing, there are always more ideas than there is time to write. At any rate, I hope you will check out the link. Thanks!

Movies in April

2010-06-02T16:18:00.001-05:00

Very busy, lots of writing getting done around these parts. Got a little sidetracked from the WIP by a flash fiction competition at SFFEditors, but I got a pretty cool little story out of it (and got to read some even cooler ones). I'm still on track to wrap this thing up by the end of June, provided I work very, very hard.

At any rate, I'm a bit late recapping the movies from April, but there weren't too many. In the Charlie Chaplin category, A King in New York was perhaps too didactic. Being written after he had left the US, it is a bit too much about how one can read and think about communist theories without being a communist, and reading and thinking about lots of things is good. There is a funny bit when the title character goes out to the movies and then to a dinner club. A Woman in Paris is another late Chaplin, one he wrote and directed but didn't appear in. It has a very Russian literary sort of feel. So, yeah, a bit of a downer. Limelight was wonderful. I do believe this is the last film he made before leaving the US; it's a story of a young panic-prone dancer and an old alcoholic comic. It also features a cameo by Buster Keaton. If only they'd done a whole film together, a buddy film. That would have been something to see. We also watched three shorts: The Good for Nothing, Charlie's Recreation and Work. Very much minor works, and one of them had been given a descriptive narration that just pissed me off. I can see what's happening here and can tell the characters apart all on my own, thank you very much. Not sure who's idea that was.

One more Hitchcock: Notorious. A film which up until now I only knew as the source for one of the scenes in Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid. (Also, I think the little girl in The Lake House is watching it in her hospital room). You can't go wrong with Ingrid Bergman and Cary Grant. We actually watched this twice; the first time through none of us spotted Hitchcock's cameo. So of course we had to watch it again to find him.

This is It, the Michael Jackson documentary of the tour that never was. It was like the special features for a really awesome concert DVD that never was. I felt bad for those young dancers, who came so close to sharing a stage with their idol and then had it snatched away.

Red Cliff is a Chinese film by John Woo, or rather two films that tell one story. And what a story it is, an epic battle in the three kingdoms period with gorgeous sets and costumes and one slow reveal of an enormous armada of ships that felt like John Woo one-upping Troy. More like ten-upping; it's an awesome shot. I also loved the fight scenes that just flirted with the beginnings of wu xia moves. No one did anything too unbelievable, but you could see where the soldiers watching the heroes fight would imbelish their feats in the telling. This is long but so worth seeing.

The Men Who Stare at Goats was delightful but strange. At the end of it I wasn't sure exactly what I had just seen, but I liked it. It has a Coen Brothers vibe but a lot more unanswered questions than the Coen Brothers usually leave.

Just one Hindi film, Pyaasa, from Guru Dutt, the director of Sahib, Bibi aur Ghulam. This shares that films gorgeous melancholy. It's like Southern gothic, only Indian, if that makes sense. Guru Dutt was the Orson Welles of India, writing, directing and starring in his films. It's a shame he died so young, he told some achingly lovely stories.

OK, wrapping up this month with a number from Swades, a movie I saw back in February, but this number has hung with me. Here's Shah Rukh Khan, teaching a village about astronomy and breaking down the segregation that divides them, all in one song and dance to an AR Rahman song:

Books in April

2010-05-23T17:16:00.000-05:00

Still on the books on writing kick, in April I read About Writing by Samuel R. Delany. Boy, did I love this book. But then Delany and I have something in common, a shared love of literary as well as genre works. There is a lot in this book about how to pursue writing as a career (and whether you should), and writing as a lifestyle. Those topics in particular I'm really keen on at the moment. This is a rich book. I've not read any Delany fiction, but I've added him to my must read list. If he's fiction is half as good as these essays, I'm going to love him.

Speaking of literary works, still working on the Bronte sisters. Having re-read Jane Eyre I went on to one I haven't read before, Shirley. Apparently this book is what popularized this name for girls; prior to it, Shirley was a rarely used boys name. There is a lot to like in Shirley, I loved the characters and the story, and particularly the backdrop of a town struggling through the industrial revolution, with the machinery leaving so many workers without work, and the Luddites that hope to turn back time. It also continues Charlotte's themes not just of feminism but her deep respect for anyone who works for a leaving.

Since in April I spent two days in airports, I loaded up my Kindle with YA. Because I'm a nervous flier, I need something that has me so hooked I don't look up enough to panic. I read three: Heist Society by Ally Carter, Eleventh Grade Burns by Heather Brewer and The Dust of 100 Dogs by A. S. King. It's a toss-up for which I liked the best between Carter and King, but that's just because I love heists and pirates pretty much equally (I don't have that deep in the marrow love of vampires that some have; my delving into vampire fiction tends not to be as passionate for me as it is for some).

Now I'm getting back to my own novel, which I'm desperately hoping to have done before the end of June. Wish me luck. In the meantime, some quotes and a kick-ass video of Bronte Sisters action figures (Ooh! I want all three! And the evil publisher!).

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We love a sentence only partially because of what it means, but even more for the manner and intensity through which it makes its meaning vivid. - Samuel R. Delany

Paraliterature is also hundred of people who have said to me, on finding out that I'm a sciene fiction writer, "oh, I don't really like science fiction," as though a) I had asked them, b) I cared, or c) I should somehow be pleased by their honesty. - Samuel R. Delany

...but I perceive that certain sets of human beings are very apt to maintain that other sets should give up their lives to them and their service, and then they requite them by praise; they call them devoted and virtuous. Is that enough? Is it to live? Is there not a terrible hollowness, mockery, want, craving in that existence which is given away to others, for want of something of your own to bestow it on? - Charlotte Bronte

Her thoughts blended together until they were like an Impressionist painting, and Kat knew she was too close to see anything plainly. - Ally Carter

A drug-addicted loser having to write his smart little sister a letter about how she should get her shit together was exactly how my mother communicated. - A.S. King

Movies in March

2010-05-04T12:12:00.000-05:00

Still working hard to polish off the WIP so I can move on to other things. Hoping to be done sometime in June. In the meantime, let's do this last March post, shall we?

In the world of Charlie Chaplin: The Circus feels like a minor work, but still engaging. City Lights was wonderful. Chaplin knows just where to end a movie. Monsieur Verdoux was strange, a talkie and a dark comedy. I didn't think Chaplin did dark. It's interesting to see this after reading his autobiography; some of what he talks about regarding the stock market becomes a plot element here, and I think a rather well done one.

In the world of Hitchcock: Rear Window and To Catch a Thief. I particularly liked the ballsy female character in the former, who's willing to show just how useful she can be and willing to do the dirty work to help out the photographer she wants to marry, but that doesn't mean she isn't still interested in fashion all the same.

Some modern films: Couples Retreat I liked better than I had expected, Up in the Air I found disappointing. I kept wishing it were a Cameron Crowe movie. Crowe wouldn't have let so many opportunities go unexplored. A Serious Man was awesome. It was shot locally in a suburb that had just had a tree-uprooting wind storm (and I think a tornado) whip through, so with new little trees in the yards it was very convincing for decades-past St. Louis Park. Extra props for the clever use of Schrodinger's cat. Yep, awesome. Last Chance Harvey isn't a great movie - it's a rather generic one - but it's worth a see just for the improv feel between Emma Thompson and Dustin Hoffman. Sherlock Holmes? Everyone already knows that was awesome; I eagerly await the sequel.

Cinematic Titanic released another live DVD, The Alien Factor. Very funny. I rather like the live DVDs, with the split screen so you can see all their faces while they do the commentary.

Animated films: The Fantastic Mr. Fox has a title that says it all. The Princess and the Frog has one of the best Disney villains in a long time. Alas, I wished I had liked this more. To me, every Randy Newman song sounds like a Randy Newman song; the New Orleans jazz elements were secondary to the Randy Newman elements. Quin says that every Danny Elfman song also sounds like a Danny Elfman song; I guess the difference is I like Danny Elfman.

Saw in theaters: Alice in Wonderland. Another movie I wanted to like more. It was visually cool but story-wise didn't blow me away as much as I would've liked.

Bollywood: Jeans has a very young Aishwarya Rai. I have a soft spot for movie plots involving twins, and this movie has every twin cliche, plus some cool dance numbers. Kyun Ho Gaya Na was horrid. I think the success of the movie depended on finding the male lead charming. I didn't. Armaan was interesting for Preity Zinta playing a no-holds-barred psycho woman. Gumnaam and Teesri Manzil are both films from the 60s with lots of bright colors, high energy dance numbers, and Helen. Helen rocks.

Lastly in TV was Doctor Who, season 4, which left me with a raging hunger to see season 5. Alas, that's not out yet. And as I'm halfway through the rewriting process, I watched season 4 of Lost. When I'm completely done I get to watch season 5. I'm working as fast as I can.

I think this month in lieu of a Bollywood number, I'll leave you with this Russian TV sketch of Charlie Chapin in The Matrix:

Books in March

2010-04-16T20:13:00.000-05:00

In March I finished a lot of books that had been stacked up around here, half-read for ages. In nonfiction I've been delving into Herbert Asbury's Gangs of New York in small doses for weeks now. It's a good book to read that way; it's a series of anecdotes from the history of New York, some of which Martin Scorsese took to weave together into a single narrative for his film of the same name. I quite like the movie, and the book is entertaining as well, although of a larger scope, as it covers quite a stretch of time. Comparing this to books from London of the same time frame makes for an interesting compare and contrast; same same but different.

I also finished Revising Fiction by David Madden, another book I've been reading bit by bit, mostly because everytime I read a bit, I immediately want to get back to work revising my WIP. This book has played a big part in getting me back to productive work by getting me excited about it all over again. Which is awesome. (Hoping to be done by the end of May and on to the next book, which I'm already gestating).

Which brings us to Harry Houdini's A Magician Among the Spirits, his account of several prominent spiritualists and how they bilk people. If he had ever met Carl Sagan, he would have heartily approved of Mr. Sagan's Baloney Detector. A very readable and interesting work and sadly still pretty relevant today.

One last nonfiction, My Autobiography by Charlie Chaplin. He wrote this after leaving the US to settle in Switzerland. He's telling his life story, but has no compunction against wandering off the narrative thread to wax eloquent on all sorts of topics. I think those ruminations were my favorite bits.

I read somewhat less fiction in March, especially considering First Spanish Reader by Angel Flores was a collection of very short stories (although, in my defense, in Spanish. Of course every facing page is in English, but I hardly ever looked over, I swear!). Some fun stories, and I found my Spanish much less rusty than I'd expected. Also on the short end of things, The Poems of Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell, the noms de plume of the Bronte sisters. I liked Charlotte's works the best; very evocative.

I'm following up Jane Austen with all the Bronte sisters, and after the Poems I jumped into Charlotte's prose, namely The Professor, her first novel (written; I think it was the last published). Bronte is pretty much the anti-Austen; she has no interest in people who don't work for a living. She's also quite the feminist (more in Shirley than here, but it starts here and grows in Jane Eyre). There is a passage in The Professor that explains a blackboard, chalk and eraser with such extreme detail, I'm wondering if this was a new invention at this point?

And in new fiction, I read In Ashes Lie by Marie Brennan. I loved the structure, and the historical details are rich. Again I'm sure if I ever went to London I could open this novel and find all these places, or stand where they once stood. Lovely.

OK, now I'm back at my own WIP again. In the meantime, the quotes I loved the best from March:

He could taste his own pulse, so strongly was his heart pounding. - Marie Brennan, In Ashes Lie

There came a time in every man's life when he had to wonder what he was doing, kneeling in a faerie court, swearing to carry out a strange double existence on behalf of creatures for whom the entirety of his lifespan would be no more than an eyeblink. - Marie Brennan, In Ashes Lie

I found poverty neither attractive nor edifying. It taught me nothing but a distortion of values, an overrating of the virtues and graces of the rich and the so-called better classes. Wealth and celebrity, on the contrary, taught me to view the world in proper perspective, to discover
that men of eminence, when I came close to them, were as deficient in their way as the rest of us... to know that intelligence is not necessarily the result of education or a knowledge of the classics. - Charlie Chaplin

Passive, at home, I will not pine.
Thy toils, thy perils shall
be mine. - Charlotte Bronte, Poems

I said to myself that my hero should work his way through life as I had seen real living men work theirs--that he should never get a shillinghe had not earned--that no sudden turns should lift him in a moment towealth and high station; that whatever small competency he might ain,should be won by the sweat of his brow; that, before he could find somuch as an arbour to sit down in, he should master at least half theascent of "the Hill of Difficulty;" that he
should not even marry abeautiful girl or a lady of rank. As Adam's son he should share Adam's doom, and drain throughout life a mixed and moderate cup of enjoyment. - Charlotte Bronte, The Professor

"... the three reliable (?) witnesses agree that the windows through which he [Daniel Dunglas Home] floated were in the third story and either sixty or eighty feet from the ground. This would make the height of each story from twenty to twenty-seven feet, but tall stories appear to have been a speciality with these remarkably observant gentlemen." - Harry Houdini

Barrels of fiery spirits stood on shelves behind the bar, and poured out their contents through lines of slender rubber hose. The customer, having deposited his money on the bar, took an end of the hose in his mouth, and was entitled to all he could drink without breathing. - Herbert Asbury, Gangs of New York

The tongs are as American as chop suey. - Herbert Asbury, Gangs of New York

Does your style lack subtlety? Blatancy will enable your reader to move from sentence to sentence, but the dominant experience will be one of blatancy. Subtlety engages your reader's own faculties - emotions, imagination, intellect. Readers who must participate through subtlety and other devices have a deeper, more intense, more lasting experience. Subtlety is not the province of the sophisticated, refined, or snobbish reader. A subtle phrase or sentence may in
actuality stimulate a violent response. - David Madden, Revising Fiction

Movies in February

2010-03-18T14:17:00.001-05:00

Having finished off Buster Keaton, or as much as the library had, we've moved on to Charlie Chaplin. Now back when the Robert Downey Jr. biopic came out, I grabbed every Chaplin movie they had at Mr. Movies. Which wasn't much. So if I'm not mentioning The Kid or The Gold Rush etc. it's because I'm only blogging on movies I'm seeing for the first time. (Man, if I blogged every movie that I watch in a month for a second or tenth or hundredth time... Actually, if I kept track of that I'd probably be pretty ashamed. I watch movies the way normal people listen to music; there's always something in the background).

At any rate, I watched Modern Times for the first time. A silent film made after the advent of talkies. OK, there is some sound here, even some speech, but the Tramp and his girl don't speak, and that's the key thing. I found it interesting that Oliver thought this ending, with the Tramp and his girl thrown out of their latest attempt at work and heading off west together to try again, was much better than the ending to The Gold Rush, which ended with the Tramp a millionaire.

The Great Dictator is a Tramp-less talkie. Chaplin had quite a melodious voice (although I'm giving Keaton an edge here; I like his timbre). There is a lot of Chaplin's heart in this one, sympathisizing with the plight of the Jews in the Nazi-mandated gettos. Even that much of it, the being set apart and labelled, is horribly dehumanizing and must be spoke out against, loudly and often, is the movie's message. He says in his autobiography that if he had known what was really going on, how much worse it all was, he never could have attempted a movie about it at all.

A few Bollywood movies: I finally saw Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge with Shah Rukh Khan and Kajol. I think I heard too many good things about it, though. It was fun, but a bit underwhelming, and it was far too rushed in the end (a common complaint I have with Bollywood movies). Swades was much better, but then from the director of Lagaan and Jodha-Akbar (namely Ashutosh Gowariker) it would have to be. I was expecting a period piece, so to see in the opening that SRK is playing a NRI who works at NASA was a jolt, but a pleasant one. And I liked how his character used his skills to build the power generator for the village in India, a combination of solid math and some guess work since it's not the sort of engineering he's ever attempted before; it felt real to me. Plus this was gorgeously shot, with great A.R. Rahman songs. Lastly I watched the 1955 version of Devdas. I'm told it follows the book more closely than Sanjay Leela Bhansali's version (I'll let you know when I've read the book myself), and I did think that Dilip Kumar was a much better Devdas than SRK, who quite frequently in his movies comes across as a sanctimonious prick. However, the Bhansali version has much better songs, and I assume it's gorgeous. (Have I complained lately about the bad, bad DVD version of this? There's not a month goes by that I don't Google to see if anyone's put it out on BluRay yet. Someone must have it somewhere; I've seen HD versions of the songs up on YouTube and they are gorgeous. I want to see that movie!).

In the category of Spanish films, I saw átame, a Pedro Almodavar film. I've liked the others of his I've seen, but this one I found upsetting and baffling. I'm not sure what point he was trying to make, or what some things meant. They must have meant something. It was frustrating.

Moon I liked, but with some reservations. Sam Rockwell is awesome in it, as multiple versions of the same guy, and Kevin Spacey was the perfect choice for the AI's voice (because of his previous films, I'm always disinclined to trust any character protrayed by Kevin Spacey; I think this works to Moon's advantage). My only gripe: why set it on the moon? I can see why attempting to recreate lunar gravity would be a pain, but if you weren't going to do it, set the story somewhere else. There is nothing here storywise that necessitates the moon and not a planet in another solar system or a space station with 1G spin. I know, I'm nitpicky, but I found it distracting.

I have no such reservations with my admiration for The Hurt Locker. Wow. War films are so prone to the hurky-jerky camera and quick-cut editing; the long, slow scenes in this movie really built the tension to a fever pitch over and over again. Especially the sniper scene, the agonizing wait. It was brilliant.

Also pretty good: The Jane Austen Book Club. Having read the novel second, I after the fact questioned some of the casting choices, and the waywardness of Prudie's plotline, but the best lines of the book made it over to the movie intact, and it was a pleasure to watch people talk about Austen.

Mr. and Mrs. Smith I've been meaning to catch for a long time. I mostly like Angelina Jolie's choices on what roles she plays (I know, I'm the only one who liked the Tomb Raider movies), and I can see what attracted her to this one. She and Brad Pitt play off each other well, a nice no-holds-barred battle between equals. My only gripe would be why does he get to be part of a co-ed organization, while she is part of an all-girl assassin group that specializes in death by pretending to be a hooker, and the only man is the boss? Ick. If she can snap a man's neck with her two hands, I don't think she needs the dominatrix outfit to pull it off.

A movie I expected to find disturbing and would not really like was Tideland, and boy was I surprised. I thought this movie was wonderful, completely inside the head of a tween girl emerging from a very tough childhood which she of course thinks is all perfectly normal. It's classic Terry Gilliam with the visual flair. I would still hesitate to actually recommend this one to anyone I didn't know really well; it is disturbing even if I found it storywise justifiably so.

Now, with TV on DVD this is stuff I finished in the month of February, not watched start to end all in the shortest month of the year. Just sayin'. So, Caprica the miniseries setting up the prequel to Battlestar Galactica I liked, although the ads for the series to follow with Eve naked and holding an apple I'm not thrilled with. Yes, I get the metaphor (it's an obvious, overdone one), but in the miniseries she's a girl who owns her sexuality, and now her she's one who's selling it. I don't like.

Tru Calling was a show that took a long time to find its voice (getting rid of the gratuitous boyfriend was a step in the right direction, and how cool is quasi-evil Jason Priestley?), and then it got axed just when it was getting interesting. *Sigh.* This is why I don't watch TV on TV anymore.

Also cancelled before its time: The Adventures for Brisco County Jr. To be fair, the show never did hit its stride, but it felt like it was about to. And who wouldn't love a steampunk/scifi/western/comedy type deal? Well my boys sure loved it, especially Oliver, and especially Lord Bowler. Just what the boy needs, another curmudgeon to idolize...

Not yet cancelled, and not likely to be soon I hope: The Big Bang Theory. I admit I was sceptical when I heard the premise, it seemed to play too hard on stereotypes (that scientists are nerds, that hot girls don't get science, etc., etc.), but after watching two seasons I'm giving the show a little salute, to show my respect. How they manage to squeeze in so many jokes that must only be funny to a select few is admirable. (I particularly liked when Sheldon called Aishwariya Rai the poor man's Madhuri Dixit. Boo yah!)

This month I'm going to leave you with a trailer which I've watched many, many times, and am already dying to see this movie. Please let it be the awesome...

Books in February

2010-03-08T14:16:00.000-06:00

I started February by polishing off Jane Austen. Northanger Abbey I liked better than I expected to; I'd heard it was her most minor work and it's clearly the work of a young writer just finding her own voice, but I liked it because of that, I think. I similarly liked Love and Freindship (there were some other things, shorter things; from looking at Wikipedia I'd guess you'd really call this her Juvenilia, Volume 2). Persuasion is a lovely last book. It feels like a last book, it has a wintry, end of a cycle quality to it. I also read Lady Susan, which was dark and interesting. All of her other books are about women up to the wedding; here is a book about a woman long after her wedding. I wished she had had a chance to write more of those.

Austen-related, I read Flirting with Pride and Prejudice, a collection edited by Jennifer Crusie full of essays, critiques, historical backgrounds, and even fan-fic all centered around Pride and Prejudice. It's a fun read from a wide variety of writers (all who love Colin Firth. But then who doesn't?)

Then I picked up The Jane Austen Book Club by Karen Joy Fowler. More accurately, I watched the movie, which I liked but hoped that the book would have more Austen discussion in it, and before the credits were done rolling I had downloaded it to my Kindle and dug in. I like it better than the movie (but when isn't that true?), it was deeper and had more of an edge. The women, for one, were older than they were in the movie. And I thought Grigg's recommendations on what books an Austenite should read to get into sci-fi were spot on (although I'd add a few, like Lois McMaster Bujold (particularly A Civil Campaign) and Naomi Novik; although she's more fantasy/alt history than sci-fi she's very Austen-y).

I've long wondered why no one was really writing superhero novels. Oh sure, there have been a few in the romance genre which were fun, and of course there's Michael Chabon using superhero elements in The Adventures of Kavalier and Klay, but I long for more. So I went into Black and White by Jackie Kessler and Caitlin Kittredge with some pretty high hopes. It didn't disappoint; two ex-classmates from a superpowered school are now nemeses in a big, bad city. Every element of this book works; I loved it. The powers are awesome, and the mechanics of how they work and why are well thought-out. And the characters are wonderful and complex. And in the irony department, the sequel is going to be called Shades of Grey. Which is such an awesome title...
.

...that Jasper Fforde has also used it. Although the book itself is filled with all sorts of colors, an entire world built around colors, and who can see them, and who can't. Remember what I loved about Niven, how he took a concept like tranfer booths and really worked through all the implications? Fforde does that here. It starts out as a simple concept, that people only see one color, and some see it better than others, and creates a vast, complex world out of it (with a caste system based on what color you can see, and how well you can see it). This isn't straight up funny like his former books, but his wit is still there, always there. I already can't wait for the next book in the series.

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Leviathan by Scott Westerfeld also featured meticulous world building, and nice details with its alternate history. My only complaint was that I wished it had been longer, but then it's a lushly illustrated YA, so it's probably just the perfect length and it's really the next book I'm longing for.

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Tenth Grade Bleeds by Heather Brewer I didn't like as well as Ninth Grade Slays, but it's still a fun, fast-paced read that really gets interesting at about the midpoint. It has middle of a series syndrome, I think; too much series plot business and not enough unique-to-this-novel plot. Still, here again I'm looking forward to the next installment.

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Lastly was a nonfic,

Literary Women by Ellen Moers, the book that Joanna Russ led me to (and there's a writer that Grigg recommends!). It's a celebration of women writers more than anything. It ends with a rather detailed list of women writers and their novels which I copied out. It's going to take me years to get through all of it, maybe a lifetime, but that's cool.

You know, with the movies I always find something on You Tube to take onto the end, and I've been wanting to do something similar with books but wasn't sure what to do (book trailers - not my kind of thing). One of the cool things about the Kindle is that I can underline things without marking up an actual book that someone else might want to read someday. So I've been highlighting all over the place. As much as I love characters, and dig good plots, what I really love is a cool line, a thought I particularly like or an artful turn of phrase. I came up with this idea late in the month, though, so this first time out I only have a couple, but next month on I'll have more, maybe more than one from a book. In the meantime:

"Doubt is good. It's an emotion we can build on. Perhaps if we feed it with curiosity it will blossom into something useful, like suspicion - and action." Shades of Grey

"Her eyes darted back and forth between the rolled-up yellow cloth and the approaching storm, wondering what a boy would do." Leviathan

"Not five minutes earlier her mother's death had been painted acros her face like one of those shattered women Picasso was so fond of. Now she looked dangerous. Now Picasso would be excusing himself, recollecting a previous engagement, backing away, leaving the building." The Jane Austen Book Club

Movies in January

2010-02-24T15:08:00.000-06:00

Still finishing up on some Woody Allen I've been missing. Don't Drink the Water was originally a play, but this version with Julie Kavner, Michael J. Fox and Mayim Bialik was done for TV. That cast probably dates it a bit. The story of a couple travelling behind the iron curtain with their daughter and inadvertently getting into trouble while taking pictures, forcing them to seek sanctuary in the US embassy for an extended stay, feels even more out of the past (although taking pictures anywhere can get you into trouble these days). I do like when Allen does the old married thing, and Julie Kavner is great. It does make me wish he'd do another film with Diane Keaton, though; she's the best of all his costars.

We also watched the last of the three James Dean films, East of Eden, based on the Steinbeck novel, which I haven't read. I ought to; I think this movie probably changed some things and I'm betting I'd like the book better.

I also used my birthday and Christmas money to pick up the last two Ang Lee movies, Lust Caution and Taking Woodstock. Both excellent films, but so very different from each other. Lust Caution is an NC-17 film with very graphic sex, and yet I've never seen a film where the sex was less gratuitous. There is so much going on with those two characters in those scenes, and the two actors do such marvellous work conveying what's not being spoken. I can't even imagine what it must be like as an actor to go to those places, but they both really nail it (ooh, bad choice of words. Perhaps I should go with the Olympic: they stick the landing. Better?). The movie made me acutely uncomfortable, but then it was supposed to. Good job, Ang Lee. Taking Woodstock is more lighthearted fare, starring a favorite in my family: Demtri Martin. I don't think I've seen a movie about the 60s as cynicism-free as this one. And Liev Schreiber is fabulous.

Hangover. Let's just say I'm not the target demographic for this one and let it go at that. (Adding, I've seen enough movies, TV shows and good god commercials that divide the world into slacker underachieving men and shrewish women. It misrepresents both genders, and it stopped being funny long ago, surely.) (But the baby was cute.)

District 9 I didn't like as well as Quin did. I thought the "message" was simplistic, and the movie itself way too splatter-gore. Conversely, I liked Cloverfield much more than Quin did. It was like a cooler, more thought-out The Blair Witch Project. In any case, it's nice to see more sci-fi movies being made that aren't big blockbuster popcorn flicks. Hopefully with special effects being cheaper and easier to do, we'll see more.

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. Given that my favorite Harry Potter book, The Order of the Phoenix, was made into my least favorite movie, and they let that director have another go, my expectations were low. So low we didn't bother seeing this in the theater. There were still things that bothered me, and I don't think this director has any storytelling instincts at all, but the cast is top notch and make the best of it. Daniel Radcliffe in particular, playing Harry under the influence of the luck potion, was surprisingly fun. I wonder what he'll tackle after the last movie, what sorts of characters he'll play. Harry Potter is a great part, but it's still a lot of being earnest and brave and not much else.

The Transporter 3. Jason Statham, not in Crank. 'nuff said.

Finally, one Hindi movie, not really a Bollywood move: Ek Ruka Hua Faisla. It's the Indian Twelve Angry Men, and it's a very faithful retelling, just a few India-specific details thrown in for flavor. It's a great story in any language, and the actors in this, not one of which was familiar to me (and I suspect they might be more stage than film actors, they have that vibe), were all wonderful.

Alas, no song and dance numbers in that one (I said it wasn't really Bollywood). But you saw these two skating to a great Bollywood medley in the Olympics, didn't you?

What I did on my week's vacation

2010-02-08T10:26:00.002-06:00

1. Had three not-really-moles removed with liquid nitrogen by a dermatologist who actually explained what these things are, why I always get them, and more importantly that they are always benign (and how to tell when I'm looking at something else). New dermatologist, he's a little bit the bomb, you know?

2. Did taxes, first year with writing income. I think without the internet and some very specifically worded Googling TurboTax would have kept me running in circles forever.

3. Reinstalled the operating system and all the software on the upstairs computer, found it still acting wonky in suspicious ways and did it all over again four days later. Man, that makes two long, long days of watching progress bars move so I can be there to click the OK button. Seems fine now, but it's starting to show its age. New computer, pretty low on the list of things I can afford to spring for at the moment, though.

4. Cleaned the house in the moving all the heavy furniture way. Including the boys' rooms. Mom goes through and pulls everything apart, digging detritus out of every nook and cranny, then they get to sort through the resulting pile in the center of the room and figure out what's going to be kept, what's going to charity, and what's just garbage.

5. I also got to watch a few more of my birthday movies (although I still have a few left to go), and I got to go out to an Indian restaurant and talk to grown ups for nearly three hours. Ah, bliss!

What I didn't do on my week's vacation:

Write. Because random notes of what I want to change don't count (even if there are pages and pages of them. Thinking and writing are related, but not the same thing).

And now it's back to work.

Books in January

2010-02-02T15:09:00.002-06:00

Starting with the sci-fi: I read two books by John Scalzi. Well, sort of. Judge Sn Goes Golfing is really a short story done up as a chapbook with illustrations. It's a fun story and the green-based illustrations make for a handsome little book. Even cooler (and longer, although still on the short end, I'm guessing novella length) is The God Engines. Loved the premise.

I also read Destroyer of Worlds, the third in the series written by Larry Niven and Edward M. Lerner. Very readable. I like the puppeteers and the Pak, but the Gw'oth, little fellows that look like starfish, are seriously cool. Their entire culture is very thoroughly thought through (although again we have an entire alien species that doesn't seem to have any women. Perhaps they're meant to be asexual, neither male nor female, but they come across as male. And I don't think that's just because of the pronouns).

Booklife by Jeff Vandermeer isn't a how to write book, it's a book about how to live the writing life. I found it completely awesome, full of great information about marketing and publicity, all the things a professional writer has to do besides just write.

He also had a few pages recommending books that truly were about writing, but not on the basics, on the more advanced aspects of the craft. I've been working my way through his list and with one exception (which I shan't name) I've really enjoyed those books as well. The Art of Subtext by Charles Baxter, aside from some wrongheaded thinking about genre fiction which seems based on the only two genre books he's read (and they aren't even the same genre), was interesting, full of examples of the techniques being described from various novels. More and more books these days, genre or not, read too much like written down movies to me and a lot of that is the lack of subtext. I like a book that requires me as a reader to actually do something, to notice things and reach conclusions that aren't completely spelled out. Of course I like movies that do that as well...

How to Suppress Women's Writing by Joanna Russ is no where near as strident as it sounds, and led me to another book I never would have found on my own (see Books in February). Having had such a tough time lately even finding time to write, the stories of other women writers struggling to do the same thing, only doing it centuries ago in a much less woman-friendly world, was particularly heartbreaking. But this book read to me more like a celebration of what women have managed to do despite it all than anything.

But even before reading Russ's book I had decided that this year rather than tackling another science fiction writer's entire catalogue as I've done in the past two years that I would make a point to read more of the "big" books by women. You know, the literary ones. I decided to start with Austen, re-reading Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice before tackling all the rest which I've not read before. Mansfield Park had some wonderful observations and secondary characters (by which I mean, Ms. Austen always gives good snark), but the main character was so reactive rather than proactive, so different from Austen's other women, I found her hard to bond with. Emma, on the other hand, is perhaps my favorite Austen woman. She is more master of her own fate than the others, but she also is the one that goes through the most growth over the course of the story.

More Austen to come in February...

Books in December

2010-01-28T00:03:00.001-06:00

Clearly, my New Year's resolution wasn't to keep up on my blog. (I actually don't make resolutions, just like I never start diets on Mondays. The time for change, you know, is always NOW).

At any rate, apparently I read some books in December...

Building Harlequin's Moon by Larry Niven and Brenda Cooper. I loved the worldbuilding in this, and the characters were engaging, but I'm afraid I found it overly long. I remember it being sporadic; for several chapters I'd be completely sucked in, and then there'd be a few chapters that dragged. It could just be me, though; December is a suck month of the year for me workwise and I really should stick to more upbeat reading.

Like Groucho Marx. I picked up Memoirs of a Mangy Lover, parts of which were in some of the other Groucho books I've been reading, but other parts were new. Groucho and I have a lot in common, it seems. He prefers the company of his children to most grown ups, so his social life is largely hanging out with them. They were more interesting companions than the grown ups, especially in Hollywood. But then it naturally follows that they were bright and engaging; if they were adorable little morons I don't think he would have bothered. I have my own feelings on the cause and effect there; even a five-year-old will bring their game up if it's Groucho their matching words with. Some great stories in here, some of which I think are almost true. (I'm quite partial to when he tells the same story from his childhood two different ways, or how his version and Harpo's version of the same story don't really resemble each other. There's truth and then there's Truth).

Clearly I'm in a weird mood.

I also read Groucho, Chico, Harpo and Sometimes Zeppo by Joe Adamson. It's sort of the bible of Marx Brothers movies, loaded with facts and anecdotes and pictures. I, of course, adored it.

Now, when I first started watching all these Marx Brothers movies, I was always struck with how much Groucho reminded me of Woody Allen, and particularly early Woody Allen. Again, the cause and effect is clearly backwards here. But I thought the time was ripe to rewatch all my Woody Allen movies, and dig into those books that have been lying around for years, waiting to be read. Woody Allen and Philosophy by Mark T. Conrad and Aeon J. Skoble is part of the Popular Culture and Philosophy Series. I have several of these and love the concept. Philosophy, it's not just for eggheads. As Allen well knows. I think part of me likes Woody Allen best because he like me never quite made it through the whole college thing. Doesn't stop us from being well read, and widely read.

I also dug into books written by Woody Allen: Without Feathers, Getting Even, Sides Effects, and Mere Anarchy. There are some really great stories in here. My personal favorite is the one where a (clearly very bad but very pretentious) literary writer is hired to write the novelization of a Three Stooges movie. What he comes up with... man, it floored me. But there's lots of good stuff here, like the man that gets written into Madame Bovary, the trials of dealing with building contractors, how scholars can go overboard to the point of finding deep meaning in laundry lists. If you like Woody Allen movies, you should check out his prose. 'Nuff said.

Now having moved on in the movie realm to Buster Keaton, it seemed appropriate to pick up his own autobiography: My Wonderful World of Slapstick. Mostly because he rather famously didn't get along with the Marx Brothers. It's not hard to see why; they work in completely different ways. His stories of his childhood are wonderful, but I think he's being a bit dishonest or at least reticent about his adult life. But then one can hardly blame him. Someone needs to make an Oscar-worthy biopic of his life, though. I'd love to see it. His wife and the studio system double-whammied the hell out of him. And then there was the alcohol. Johnny Depp already nailed his look and mannerism in Benny and Joon, so he's my pick.

Rounding off with a little YA, and namely Justine Larbalestier. How to Ditch Your Fairy was fun, set in a cool world where everyone has their own fairy with one particular skill. Some cool, like a shopping fairy so you always find the perfect outfit at ridiculously low prices, and some not, like the main character's parking fairy, so she always findings the perfect parking space even though she can't yet drive. So other people always want her in their cars. I get the sense this was just a oner, which is a shame. It's a cool world I'd like to see more of. I also picked up Liar, which is my favorite sort of book, the sort where you think what's going on, but then everything turns, but in a way where you really feel like you should have seen it coming, only you didn't. That moment of turning is absolutely delicious; I live (or rather read) for those moments. Saying all that is probably spoiler enough, though; I shall say no more.

Movies in December

2010-01-02T10:20:00.004-06:00

Still on the old films kick: in December we all watched On the Waterfront with Marlon Brando and two of the three James Dean films: Rebel Without A Cause and Giant. On the Waterfront was interesting; apparently Elias Kazan's apologia for naming names. He doesn't make a particularly compelling argument for himself, but Marlon Brando is worth a watch in anything. The boys particularly liked Rebel Without A Cause, and Oliver observed "I'd rather be a chicken than a corpse", which is heartening. That's one less conversation to have in his teen years, anyway. Giant is an epic story set in Texas. I'm betting this was a doorstop of a novel; it felt like a lot of details were left out, and the movie still ran over two discs. James Dean was quite good in both of these; it's a shame he died so young, he really had something.

Quin and I watched Inglourious Basterds (do you have any idea how hard I have to concentrate to type the words that way?). Not my favorite Tarantino, but it had some moments. Brad Pitt and the fellow playing the Nazi were particularly good. But there was one point at the very end where I covered my eyes. Because there are some things I just don't need to see.

Which makes the next bit ironic. I perhaps waited too long to see Scarface for the first time. After Inglourious Basterds (which I watched the night before), both the violence and the language seemed really understated. I'm puzzled why the gangster-types love this movie so much; it's a pretty clear picture of the cost for their particular lifestyle. I don't think they're seeing the same movie as I am.

I caught up on seasons 2 and 3 of Doctor Who. I liked Christopher Eccleston and was disappointed when he only did one season, but it seems like I'm not alone in finding David Tennant quickly became my favorite Doctor. I much prefer the oner episodes, though. It seems everytime he meets a Dalek or a Cyberman or any of the old villians, the story will be resolved by the Doctor pulling some technobabble solution out of no where to save the day. I like to have some clue where a story is going, or at least a sense that I should have a clue. Things that come out of the blue, the tech-the-tech solutions I find very unsatisfying.

Having rewatched my Woody Allen films recently I found some gaps at the early and late ends of his canon which I used my birthday money to fill in. Cassandra's Dream came out just before Vicky Cristina Barcelona but I never heard a thing about it. Which is a shame; it's a tight story (although one of Allen's downer stories, with Match Point and Crimes and Misdemeanors). I've never really seen Colin Firth in anything; I've burned DareDevil from my memory except a few Jon Favreau bits, and although I remember liking Minority Report I can't recall more than a scene with a car driving up skyscraper. I thought he was just the latest pretty boy, but he's genuinely moving in this movie. When his character gets upset I want to stop the movie, step into the screen, and give him a big hug and maybe make him some tea.

Whatever Works is Allen's most recent, and it stars Larry David. Two comics with very distinctive voices; it's cool how they mesh together. This was a fun one. I distinctly remember how much lighter my outlook on life was after seeing this movie (have I ever mentioned how grindingly hard the month of December is? I needed this movie).

On the other end were a few of Allen's early films which I missed, things he wrote and appeared in but didn't direct himself. Play It Again, Sam has Diane Keaton in it, always a plus. Woody Allen is a schlemp who starts getting life advice from Humphrey Bogart (or more properly an amalgam of Bogart characters), but eventually grows beyond the need for such advice. Lots of cool touches for movie buffs, although the fact they were all in San Francisco never ceased to catch my attention in a "look at that view; they're so not in New York" kind of way.

What's New Pussycat? didn't do it for me at all. It stars Peter Sellers, a comic I've never grokked. Outside of the Pink Panther movies, that is. His multiple roles in Lolita ruined the movie for me (so distracting), and quite often for a funny man he just comes across as mean. Maybe I haven't seen his great films, I don't know. At any rate, this isn't one of them. I do rather wonder what Woody's script looked like originally, and how badly it was mangled in production. There is very little about the final product that feels like Woody Allen.

Finishing off the smaller appearances by the Marx Brothers, or at least Harpo, I watched Stage Door Canteen, a multi-starrer about troops about to ship out for WWII and the entertainers that, well, entertain them. It doesn't really hold together as a movie, but all of the musical acts are fun to watch, and Harpo shows up for about a minute and a half. (Harpo talking about WWII is one of the touching bits of his autobiography; having briefly passed through Germany in the early days of Hitler's rule and seeing the fear in the eyes of the Jews living there he was struck very deeply and while too old when America entered the war to enlist he did devote the next few years to doing everything he could do, performing for troops about to ship out or for the ones in the hospitals. Hence the several-year gap between his first son and the rest of his kids).

Less entertaining was The Story of Mankind, an extremely preachy film about the dangers of the atom bomb, with mankind on trial, blah blah blah. Each of the Marx Brothers appears for a scene, Harpo as a harp-playing Isaac Newton, Chico very briefly talking to Christopher Columbus, and Groucho - clearly having tossed the dreck script they handed him and writing his own actually funny lines - as the European who bought Manhattan for a handful of beads. Well, it was cool to see them all in color. And Vincent Price as the devil was clearly having a ball chewing the scenery.

Is this a good place to mention Cinematic Titanic's latest? Actually, I think yes. Like the Marx Brothers, they like to try their jokes out before a live audience or two by taking their act on the road before committing things to film. East Meets Watts is a taste of one of those live shows, with some pretty effective split screen work. If only I ever had a chance to get out of the house for a night, I'd love to go to one of their shows.

I'll finish off with a little Buster Keaton. I have a soft spot for Buster; the man worked hard and sincerely thought if you worked hard enough, the powers that be would recognize and reward it. Sadly, in his case he just got deeply screwed by a movie studio that had no ability to recognize what made a Buster Keaton movie actually work. Bunch of meddlers. Buster, at least in his autobiography, didn't have too much ill will about this; he kept on working, helping other acts with Keatonesque stunts (which is how he ran up against the Marx Brothers, who pretty much had the reverse work ethic: you'll only ever get what you can demand and take for yourself). I can see why Keaton felt the way he says he felt; he did always have a steady paycheck doing something he enjoyed. But man! The rest of us got screwed out of all the other things he could have done if they'd just left him alone to do it.

So in December we watched Go West with the shorts The Scarecrow and The Paleface, Our Hospitality (which features his wife; interesting to see what she looked like), Sherlock Jr. and the truly awesome Steamboat Bill, Jr. with the shorts Convict 13 and Daydreams. Buster's dad wasn't keen on movies; he thought they were a flash in the pan. Why would anyone pay to see performers on film when you could see them live in a theater?

But Buster knew why, clearly. The stunts he constructed could scarecely be pulled off in a live theater. Man, the things he could do with trains alone. His dad did eventually come around, appearing in a lot of Buster's films. Buster's mainly remembered these days for his physicality, and the man really did do some impressive stunts (I suspect Jackie Chan is a fan). But what I like best about him is his engineering. The stunts he sets up; I'm envious of that mechanical mind. Like I said, the things the man could do with trains. But on a smaller scale, I'll close with this little bit from The Scarecrow, of a bachelor pad that is all rooms in one room. Take a look, after they pull out Buster's tooth, to how they transform every thing in the house, and how they set the table.

That's so awesome.

Movies in November

2009-12-23T22:50:00.000-06:00

What did I see in November? Well, in the category of things you've probably seen too: Land of the Lost with Will Ferrell. Too be honest, I never really got Will when he was on SNL, but with every movie he's done since I've grown to love him a little bit more. This movie bares almost no resemblence to the old TV show, but then that show was never very good. The movie I found funny, and the boys certainly enjoyed it.

I finally got to see Up. The boys saw it at the theater one day when I was working and very studiously avoided spoiling it for me until I could finally see it on DVD. Pixar is really the Studio Ghibli of America; even their minor films are far superior to the rest of the dreck out there, and this is not one of their minor films. I've heard some complaint of the lack of female characters in this, which I think is ridiculous. His wife may die in the opening of the movie, but her presence is felt all over it. I know because she made me cry at least three times. Which is a good thing.

Leatherheads I got just for George Clooney. It didn't disappoint. The Proposal I got just for Sandra Bullock. It did. (Although Ryan Reynolds was funny, and Betty White. It had some good scenes, but they didn't for me add up to a satisfying movie).

Finally saw Star Trek. Yep, it was all kinds of awesome. My boys have watched it a couple of times now.

Girlfight is a bit older, the first movie from Michelle Rodriguez as a girl who wants to learn to box. I loved the real quality of it, and her character is wonderfully complex and matures in a believable way. I would recommend this one if you like me missed it before.

Even older still is Shane. To be honest, we picked this one up from the library after hearing an old Bill Hicks number about something Jack Palance's character does in this movie. Something that he, in fact, doesn't actually do. A quick search of the internet shows I'm not the only one confused. It's an interesting movie, although the main character is way too pretty to be believable as a cowboy.

We've been working our way through the Alfred Hitchcock catalogue, and in November this meant Strangers on a Train and The Trouble with Harry. The boys like thrillers so they were engrossed by Strangers on a Train, but it was The Trouble with Harry that had them talking for days. We also caught the last Marx Brothers' movie, Love Happy. This can more properly be called a Harpo Marx movie. Which suits me fine (have I mentioned that I'm crushing on Harpo? Yeah, even here when he's just past 60, he's still a little cutie).

We've also been watching all the Buster Keaton movies we can find. The Cameraman was our first, and it's very cool. I knew before that Keaton was a master of physical comedy and in particular taking hard falls. And he does a lot of that here, hopping onto moving fire trucks and diving into pools. But what I didn't know going in was how much of an engineer's mind he had. He set up really elaborate gags and camera shots that are incredibly impressive. Although for my money the funniest scene in this movie is when he and a big galoot are both changing into swimsuits in the same tiny, tiny closet, getting in each other's way and getting their suits mixed up.

The Spite Marriage had some wonderful moments as well, particularly a hapless Keaton trying to put his new passed-out-drunk wife to bed. But even better is The General. In this movie Keaton is a train engineer that is turned down by the Confederate army because they need him as a trainman, but when his paramour is kidnapped by Union soldiers hijacking a train he gives chase all the way past the Mason-Dixon line, and then runs south again after rescuing her, Union soldiers in hot pursuit. So essentially the movie is all one long train chase, and everything they do to try to throw off the train behind them, and everything Keaton does to thwart them. And the girl trying to help but always making things more complicated. The General came with two of his short films, Cops, which is a Keystone cops thing, and The Playhouse, which opens with multiple Buster Keatons. Five of him are on the stage, dancing. Four more are in the orchestra pit, playing instruments. The audience seems at a glance to be men, women and children, but on closer look they are all Buster Keaton as well. Don't let the silent movie thing turn you off; these movies are awesome.

Free and Easy, by comparison, is a Buster Keaton talkie. He has a marvelous speaking voice, and he even did his own Spanish, German and French versions for the overseas markets. Alas, the movie is not all that great. It has what we around these parts call a Bollywood ending; the character we've grown to love puts his own feelings aside and lets the girl go off into the sunset with his rival. This ending is incredibly moving when done correctly. Alas, this movie isn't an example of done correctly.

I've been intending to see Pedro Almodovar's films since pretty much high school. (And yes, the movies people were recommending to me in high school do seem strange when I finally get around to seeing them. I'm not sure how I was coming across to people.) At any rate, this month I finally saw Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown. It was an interesting movie filled with complicated women. Of course the real highlight is Antonio Banderas. He must be 20 or 21 here, but already has amazing screen presence.

I watched four Bollywood movies, all starring Aamir Khan. Jo Jeeta Wohi Sikhandar with schools competing in a sports thing was fun. Qayamat Se Qayamat Tak is a retelling of Romeo and Juliet. I kind of wish it had been a closer retelling as Omkara was of Othello. Awwal Number was about terrorism and cricket. It could've used more cricket. Sarfarosh was also about terrorism, but was much more interesting and watchable, largely due to Naseeruddin Shah as the bad guy.

Still, none of these had a really mindblowing musical number, so this month's video clip is from The Big Store. It's not one of the better Marx Brothers movies, but I do love this bit. You can really tell here that they are brothers (and you can really tell which one is the little brother). The Marx Brothers really existed just to amuse each other; the fact that the audience was also enjoying it was quite incidental.

Did I mention I have another story up?

2009-12-13T20:46:00.003-06:00

I have another story available to read online. It's the little taste of the December 2009 issue of Aoife's Kiss that they're offering on their website as an enticement (click the magazine cover to order print copies; it's a good mag). It's called "Full Circle" and is my first sci-fi sale, although depending how you interpret events you might consider it to have an element of fantasy. It's deliberately amibiguous. (Hint: it's sci-fi). I've updated the Stories page on my website with my usual blurbage.

(For some reason Blogger is resisting my efforts to copy/paste anything in here just now. Weird.)

Books in November

2009-12-12T15:25:00.003-06:00

I hate daylight savings time. My body is a strict timekeeper, apparently. The nudge of one hour either direction makes my inner pendulum start swinging wildly and I find myself waking at all hours of the night feeling like I'm all done sleeping, then fighting to stay awake when I'm meant to be working. This year was particularly bad. Not being one to waste time, I can't just lie there and wait to fall back to sleep. But you know, watching the sunrise while reading Harpo Marx, it's not all bad.

So I did a colossal amount of reading in November, falling into two categories: Larry Niven and the Marx Brothers. (And one of the other side effects of being off my schedule sleepwise is I have particularly vivid dreams. Ever see the Marx Brothers perform in the microgravity of The Smoke Ring? I have. It's quite a sight).

I will be dealing more extensively with the Marx Brothers later (I'm holding onto that post until I finish this gorram novel), so here I will merely note that the autobiographies Groucho and Me and especially Harpo Speaks are wonderful, wonderful books. Short childhoods in late nineteenth century New York, working the vaudeville circuit then Broadway and Hollywood; the two of them were full of stories and knew how to tell them. I wish Chico had written something; he ran with a whole different crowd than his little brothers. What stories he must have had. I also read The Groucho Letters and The Essential Groucho. I can see why Woody Allen adores him.

I plowed through the Niven. The Integral Trees and The Smoke Ring I liked the worldbuilding in them, but the stories themselves didn't really do it for me. Fallen Angels by Larry Niven, Jerry Pournelle and Michael Flynn was fun.

The rest were short story collections, and there was a lot of repetition so in some cases to say I "read" a particular book only really involved reading the one new story it contained. But just for the sake of completeness, by name they were The Flight of the Horse (loved it), A Hole in Space (for a woman to be 20 pounds overweight when she's 145 pounds, she would have to be five feet tall. I'm just sayin'. And yes, Bridget Jones irritates me as well), Convergent Series, Limits, N-Space, Playgrounds of the Mind (these latter two really having a cool format with fun bits thrown in like special features on a DVD), Crashlander, Rainbow Mars, Scatterbrain, and The Draco Tavern (another highlight for me). I like Niven the best when he's writing a series of short stories exploring every possible angle of a problem, like transfer booths. I also like the vignette quality of his Draco Tavern stories. The lack of characters I can bond with doesn't bother me as much in those cases, and the ideas really are interesting.

OK, back to work on my own book. I'm hoping to have to finished before 2010. I now have two seasons of Lost still in the plastic because I haven't earned watching them yet. Man, I hope they're worth it.

Movies in October

2009-12-02T19:10:00.000-06:00

Oh dear, with the lateness. It's time to post my November wrapups, and I still have this October one left.

OK, first off we watched more Marx Brothers: A Day at the Races, Go West, The Big Store, Room Service and At the Circus. I've got too much to say about the Marx Brothers to possibly cover it here; I'll have to do a whole other post just on them. (Watch for it!). In the meantime, I dug up this clip on YouTube of Harpo's one "speaking" role... in a silent film. It's the comments here that amuse me. I'm not the only one who thinks Harpo is a little hottie.

I saw two films I can put in the category of irreverance: Bill Maher's Religulous and Year One. Religulous was entertaining. Bill Maher talks to a wide range of people from different religious backgrounds. I was afraid I would find this too mocking, but Bill pretty much stepped back and let them make fools of themselves. Year One was funny in a more family friendly way; the boys sure enjoyed it. I was impressed with the look of the film; the costumes and sets were fantastic. I'm hoping for a Year Two, but only if it's as funny.

I watched a slew of Bollywood films, namely Sangdil Sanam, Jaagruti, Bandhan, Baaghi, Sanam Bewafa and Paheli. Some I enjoyed more than others, but they all sort of blend in my head now.

Inkheart I enjoyed, particularly Andy Serkis. I have this book; I'm totally going to read it someday.

We saw Where the Wild Things Are in the theater. It was well worth it. Most films for children that deal with empathy oversimplify it horribly. I particularly appreciated how the wild things are not 1:1 correspondences with the main character's mother, sister, etc. They share some characteristics with them (and with him), and some of the situations are similar, but nothing is a direct metaphor. The boy learns from interacting with all these different personalities and watching them interact with each other. Getting along with others is a messy business, and often hard work. Outside of that, the special effects are wonderful. There is no "uncanny valley" between the boy and the monsters; they both look real from every angle.

TV on DVD: I caught up with How I Met Your Mother season 4 and Two and a Half Men season 6. How I Met Your Mother is still going strong, I think, but Two and a Half Men is getting repetitious. But the jokes are still funny; I'll probably be back again for season 7.

Lastly is the miniseries Torchwood: Children of Earth. With the team down to just Captain Jack, Gwen and Ianto I was expecting lots of naked hide and seek highjinks. So the darker tone caught me off guard, but this was an excellent finish to a show I've enjoyed. The characters had to make some hideously hard choices that had consequences. I'm sorry this is the end of Torchwood, but at least it ended with a bang.

Books in October

2009-11-14T15:25:00.000-06:00

My suspicion that I'm really a Steven Barnes fan deepens. This month I read The California VooDoo Game, The Descent of Anansi, Achille's Choice and Saturn's Race, all collaborations between Larry Niven and Steven Barnes. They mesh cool ideas from science combined with compelling, believable characters. Together they make some of my favorite books since I started this Niven kick. I've already added Steven Barnes' name to my list of writers to check out next; I suspect he writes some good women characters.

I also read A World Out of Time by Larry Niven alone. I like a lot of the ideas in here (the cat tails are particularly cool), but the idea where without sex the world would devolve into a nation of girls and a nation of boys who never have contact with each other gave me the terrors. The very idea, living my whole life only with other girls for companionship, and me with nonfunctioning reproductive organs, so why should it matter anyway... Outside of my personal prejudices; I find it a bit unbelievable. My own childhood experience was of mixed genders that only really formed distinct gender-specific groups around the onset of puberty (and I never did the distinct group thing myself). But then I've been told I'm a bit odd.

And the first novel I bought and read entirely on my Kindle (until this point I've been using it to convert and read my critique group's work on the treadmill): Don't Judge a Girl by her Cover by Ally Carter. I read this on the way to and from Rapid City, South Dakota. By a weird coincidence, on my last anniversary that involved a trip out of town (to Duluth two years ago) I was reading Ally's last book, Cross My Heart and Hope to Spy. These are great books; a terrific premise well-executed. Hopefully book four will be out by next October.

I read three nonfiction books in October as well: a memoir, a pop science, and a foreign language grammar book. Cause that's just how I roll. Infidel by Ayaan Hirsi Ali was thoroughly engrossing, a tale of her childhood in Somalia, Saudi Arabia and Kenya and her escape from an arranged marriage into Holland, leading up to her election to parliament there, the murder of her partner in filmmaking Theo Van Gogh by an Muslim extremist, and her removal from parliament on petty bureaucratic grounds and relocation to the US. I hope we've been treating her well; she's a sharp one with plenty to say. I highly recommend this book, and hope to hear more from her.

Having seen him speak a bit in Bill Maher's Religulous, I picked up Why We Believe What We Believe by Andrew Newberg MD. Dr. Newberg performed functional MRIs of Buddhists monks, Catholic nuns, Pentecostals and even an aetheist while they prayed, meditated, or spoke in tongues. The results are intriguing, but it left me wanting more data. I'd like to see him keep on with more "normal" people. There is something to be learned from the people at the extremes, certainly, but I'm more interested in the rest of us normal folks. What's going on in our brains?

The last book for Ocober was Introduction to Hindi Grammar by Usha R. Jain. This is another textbook with no answer key (so no true friend to the self-learner) but a good resource. The grammar is broken down in an easy to understand manner, I just wish I had some way of checking if I'm on track, or if I only think I'm on track.

Movies in September

2009-10-30T12:40:00.000-05:00

Where does the month go? You'd think with a week off I would have had time to catch up, but no. More swamped than ever. Well, let's wrap this up before October ends.

Our family favorite: the Marx Brothers. We watched four of these in September. Animal Crackers and The Cocoanuts had all four Marx Brothers, A Night at the Opera and A Night in Casablanca just three. If only Zeppo had had a schtick. A Night at the Opera is justly revered. I think Oliver in particular liked the bit where Groucho moved through the audience during the performance, heckling the opera. But then he would.

Other things we watched all together: Wolverine, which was more fun than I was expecting (but then my expectations were low).

Gundam Wing I found horrible to slog through. The episodes were an endless series of infodumps and the plot was convoluted, and not in a good way. There was no real story, but the look of the show was top notch. The boys of course like the Gundams but I thought even the character design was well done. Alas for the writing. I wonder if the dialogue sounds more natural in Japanese? In the end I took to heckling this show myself, which the boys found amusing, and Quin took to taking long Gundam naps.

Wallace and Grommit: Loaf or Death was clever and charming, natch. I can always rely on Wallace and Grommit to give me a warm glow.

Watched with Quin: Heroes Season 3. The show is starting to irk me. There are two main problems here. Half the time the characters are acting in ways that make no sense for who they are, like Matt Parkman suddenly deciding he's going to kill innocent people to get back at the guy who let his girlfriend die. I never quite bought that he felt as strongly for the speedy girl as we were meant to believe he did, and the little bit of faith I was giving that in the name of playing along was destroyed when he promptly forget her and went back to his wife. Quite a bit like Peter totally forgetting the girlfriend he left behind in some alternate future. Sure he can't get back to her now, but he doesn't ever even seem to think about her. The other problem is pretty much the opposite, the endless circularity of what I'm sure the writers have decided are the characters' primary motivations. Claire is the worst offender here: every conversation she has with anybody sounds just like the last ten conversations she had with them; why is she still tearing up as if these emotions were fresh? Ugh. If the actors weren't so likeable I wouldn't bother anymore.

We also watched to foreign films: Run Lola Run in German and Sin Nombre in Spanish. I'm late to the Run Lola Run party, but it is a seriously cool flick. Sin Nombre is about how much life sucks when you're poor in the slums of Central America, to the point where risking your life to ride on the top of a train in the hopes of reaching the US is worth it. Well done, but very depressing.

And on my own: Bollywood. I watched another sort of Heroes, this time a movie about the families of soldiers in the Indian army who had died in Kashmir. There were some nice bits (particularly Salman Khan in a beard and Panjab accent), but it took too long to get started and I don't think ever really made its point.

A better movie about Kashmir is Mission Kashmir. This was one of the first movies from Hrithik Roshan and he is amazing in it as an adult survivor of a horribly traumatic childhood. He is so convincingly traumatized, though, that the happy ending felt false to me. I was expecting his character to die, which would have been a horrible downer but, I think, more honest. Jackie Shroff is also very good here, wonderfully creepy (I thought his character was always hunched the way he was because it made his gaze so intense, but there's a real piece of back story there). A good film despite the ending.

I had more mixed feelings about Aamir Khan's Ghajini. It is similar to, and was certainly inspired by, Memento, but unlike many Bollywood takeoffs of American films the stories themselves are very different. Khan's character (who is very, very buff) also can't remember more than 20 minutes at a time and takes pictures and leaves notes for himself in his quest to find his fiancee's murderer, but it's clear early on that unlike Memento he isn't to blame, and the actual story is very uniquely Mumbai, with gangsters and girls from villages enslaved in brothels (after having their kidneys stolen; this isn't a happy story). The darkness of that story is offset by the lightness of the back story, of how Khan's character met and wooed his fiancee. Personally, I liked the back story better; the actress playing the fiancee had a great energy and their romance was very believable (a film rarity in any language, I find). Alas, the present time story was too violent for me, and I had to cover my face in two places because I didn't want to risk seeing what I was afraid I was going to see (having watched Salman Khan have his skull crushed twice I no longer take any chances when villains approach with blunt instruments). And the ending was very drawn out. It felt like a video game, and as it's since been made into one I guess that's not a coincidence.

The last film was one Aamir Khan produced, starring his nephew Imran Khan, Jaane Tu Ya Jaane Na. This was written and directed by Abbas Tyrewala, a guy who's got a writing credit in a ton of other films I've enjoyed. The characters feel like real people (even the two guys wearing Western gear and riding on horses to all the clubs of Mumbai, and that's saying something). Tyrewala also wrote the lyrics to the songs in the film, which was a nice touch. Here the music feels more a part of the story, less a pop music intrusion. Of course having AR Rahman do the music is always a nice touch. I linked before to "Pappu Can't Dance" back when Rahman won his Oscar, so here I'll put "Kabhi Kabhi Aditi", the song Imran's character sings to cheer up Aditi, who has just suffered a major loss: her cat has died (hence the kitty in the basket):

Mount Rushmore (with pictures!)

2009-10-26T11:03:00.000-05:00

Back from our whirlwind two-day trip to South Dakota and Wyoming. I'm going to have to spread these pictures out over a few blog posts here. (And I'm not sure when I'll figure out how to upload the video I shot).

It rained nearly the entire way to Rapid City, so we didn't get to see much fall color, and it was dark by the time we got to our hotel. It was in the low 30s when we woke up in the morning, but we had come prepared with parkas, hats and mittens.

When we got to Mount Rushmore it was foggy and covered with frost and patches of snow: very pretty.

We spent the morning around Mount Rushmore. They have a walking trail made from that plastic lumber, all steps and patios with lots of benches. The snow melted as we walked, and we saw a few mountain goats skipping through the rubble or eating the lichen.

In the afternoon we went to Jewel Cave. We took the hour and a half tour through the cave plus hiked some trails near there. The boys did a series of activities with the park rangers and earned ranger patches and badges both. After that we headed to Custer Park, but got there too late to see much. We just drove through and saw tons of deer, but alas couldn't find the bison.

After nearly two hours underground:

I was still learning all the features of the camera, so most of my shots of the cave didn't turn out, but I got a few:

The cave tour follows these metal walkways up and down and around; it's quite dizzying. The cave didn't get much narrower than this; good thing, as we weren't supposed to touch any of the rocks.

More Mount Rushmore (with pictures!)

2009-10-26T11:02:00.000-05:00

Watching the mountain goat eat:

Pushing snow off the bannisters while walking (you think they'd never seen snow before):

What pictures can't convey: the smell. Particularly on the trails around the Jewel Cave where they had just done a controlled fire; it was a smokey, piney smell that was just lovely.

This is still at Mount Rushmore before the snow melted:

By the time we left to go to Jewel Cave the snow was gone, but when we arrived in the bust of Borgeum had a nice snow toupee.

Devil's Tower (with pictures!)

2009-10-26T11:01:00.000-05:00

On the day we were going to come back home we decided to head west to Wyoming first and see Devil's Tower. Which took quite a bit longer than I thought it would; we didn't get home until 1 in the morning. That was a long, long day. But the trail winds around the base of Devil's Tower was cool, and it was nice to get a good hike in before spending 12ish hours in a car.

This is from an overlook on the way to Devil's Tower (see it there, in the back?). Waiting for someone to click a picture while staring straight into the sun, but trying not to stare straight into the sun:

Climbing the rocks around Devil's Tower:

A nice overlook at the valley below. We could hear the cows bellowing. Quin and the boys:

Me and the boys:

More Devil's Tower (with pictures!)

2009-10-26T11:00:00.000-05:00

Someone is always looking for a pose that just has to be a picture:

Pretending to stack rocks (they were like that when we got there):

The one picture where you can kind of see that we are in fact at the foot of Devil's Tower:

The three of us standing at the bottom of Devil's Tower:

Books in September

2009-10-15T12:35:00.001-05:00

Still working my way through the Niven catalog. First was the Niven/Pournelle/Barnes sequel to The Legacy of Heorot, Beowulf's Children. Not quite as "this should be a movie" as the first book, but the fact that this felt more novel-like is a good thing. My only quibble: I wasn't buying the evolved, more intelligent grendel conceiving of a grendel god. Deities are such social constructs, I don't see how or why a solitary animal would create one, or feel the need to create one. That aside, it was a killer story.

In the Niven and Barnes sans Pournelle category, I read Dream Park and its sequel The Barsoom Project. These were both awesome too. In these books and the two above, the women characters feel so much more real and complete in a way I don't find them in books just by Niven or Niven and Pournelle that I'm beginning to suspect I might be a bit of a Steven Barnes fan. I'll have to add his name to the list of writers I plan to read up on.

The Greatest Show on Earth by Richard Dawkins. What can I say? I just found one of the spines for my high school biology curriculum. This book is amazing. Part of my reason for homeschooling my boys was the way public schools tiptoe around evolution. They mention it (which is enough to piss off certain people), but they never actually teach it, what it is, how it works, and most of all the wealth of evidence we have for it. This book does all those things, and Dawkins with his wit is such a pleasure to read. My own understanding of evolution is mainly from the medical end, genetics and comparative anatomy, so the chapters on geology and fossils I found particularly informative. I've never really read up on all that before, and it is dead interesting. I highly, highly recommend this one. I don't know how anyone could look at life this way and not be overwhelmed with awe and wonder at how it all works. We live in an amazing world.

Lastly, A Primer of Modern Standard Hindi by Michael J. Shapiro. I've actually been working on this one for a while. It starts assuming no knowledge of Hindi and then builds to a level I found to be just about where Teach Yourself Hindi ends, so it was perfect for me. It contains a selection of snippets from actual readers used in schools in India, little stories about the gardens of Kashmir, or folk tales, even the opening of Alice in Wonderland all in Hindi. There was also a thorough discussion of the grammar. I'm such a grammar geek sentences like "It is possible to arrange a number of the most common Hindi adverbial forms into a highly systematic paradigm" actually make me swoon a little.

But I suppose that's just me.

Movies In August

2009-09-22T12:45:00.000-05:00

I went to an actual movie theater in August! The whole family went to see Ponyo. I would say it was completely enchanting, animated with such a loving attention to detail, with warm-hearted characters and beautiful storytelling. But I could just say "it's the new Miyazaki film" and if you know Miyazaki, the rest is redundant. It's not my favorite of his, but that still makes it superior to most of the rest of what's out there. I can't wait for it to come out on DVD so I can watch it again.

TV on DVD this month: two more seasons of Two and a Half Men. Still funny, still no real character growth here. Comfort TV, I guess. It's not really a show to watch all the episodes back to back. But it is just amusing enough to have running in the background while you balance the checkbook or make dinner.

Battlestar Galactica 4.5 I found disappointing. On the one hand, each individual character finished off their arc nicely. but it never resolved any of the issues that were the themes of the show. Instead of learning to live together, they basically hit the big REBOOT button and started all over again. Lame. Plus I hate Adam and Eve stories, even if they are mitochondrial Eve. (And I'm totally not buying that all the survivors who couldn't agree on anything for five years all agreed to forgo civilization in favor of the short life spans and high infant mortality and lack of higher culture that goes with deciding to blend with the neanderthals).

Of course Dollhouse was better. I'm not sure about that last episode; postapocalyptic stories are nearly as over done as Adam and Eve. But it's Joss Whedon, I'm willing to withhold judgement until I see what he does with it.

Cinematic Titanic: The Blood of the Vampires. Filipinos pretending to be 19th century Mexican hacienda owners? Other Filipinos in blackface pretending to be the servants? How could that ever be cheesy?

In brief, movies I didn't like at all: Revolution Road. I kept hearing Spike's voice in my head: "And by the way, I would be insanely happy if I heard bugger all about sodding France." Boondock Saints. Because life would be so much better if we got rid of the police and court system and just killed all the bad guys ourselves. There's never any mystery who they are, and innocent bystanders would never get hurt. Sounds like a plan. Fast & Furious (Reloaded) has none of the cheesy goodness of the second F&F movie, and is not fresh and new like the third. It's not exactly a rehashing of the first one either, though. The characters have evolved. It wasn't bad, just completely superfluous. Expelled, where Ben Stein insists that teaching evolution will make us all Nazis. Quin wanted to watch this one. I found it silly and depressing.

The Wrong Guy was nice low-key comedy from Dave Foley. He plays a fellow who thinks he's been mistaken for his boss's murderer and goes on the lam, when in fact no one actually thinks he did it. He falls in with Jennifer Tilly, a narcoleptic, and her father Joe Flaherty, who owns an S&L in a farm town where he's bullied by the local farmer who runs the town, buying up businesses so he can turn them into more fields. Not hardhitting comedy by any means, but I enjoyed it more than I expected to.

An even bigger surprise was how much the whole family is loving the Marx Brothers movies. In August we watched Duck Soup, Animal Crackers and Horse Feathers, three of the early films from when there were still a foursome. I'm actually crushing on Harpo Marx a bit.

OK, finishing off as always with Bollywood. I saw two Salman Khan films, one old and one new. The new was Yuvvraaj, which had elements of Rain Man, Shine, etc. with Anil Kapoor from Slumdog Millionaire playing a man with some sort of autism-type thing who inherits all of his father's money. The other two brothers, Salman and Zayed Khan, at first attempt to find a way to get the money from him but of course grow to love him as a brother in the end. But music is what eventually brings them together, particularly Salman and Anil with Katerina Kaif as the cello player that is the bridge between them. I've never been particularly impressed with Kaif; she's a model turned actress who started out having her dialogue dubbed over by better actresses. She does her own lines now and she's not sounding too bad here. But in particular I was impressed with her ability to pretend to play the cello. In most Bollywood movies, the instrument playing makes Robert Palmer's backup band look like masters of the craft. But Katerina Kaif manages to look like she's seen a cello before, and knows where the high and low notes are and how to move between them. Of course I don't actually play the cello, but she looked pretty good to me. And she is gorgeous.

Chal Mere Bhai was an older Salman Khan movie, and it's a total bromance with Sanjay Dutt. Sure, the story is about two brothers in a love triangle with Karishma Kapoor, who is cute as a button as always. But really, this movie is all about Khan and Dutt being affectionate with each other. It was one of the first cultural differences Quin and I found when we started watching Bollywood movies with Andaz Apna Apna and Sholay. Are these two guys supposed to be gay? I later found that gay characters in Bollywood films are done so broadly there is never any question. Think Hollywood Montrose in the movie Mannequin. The men in Bollywood movies are just much more comfortable being physical with each other than Hollywood men are (hobbits aside).

Sometimes it's not just a matter of tickle fights in bed or getting up on each other's shoulders, though. Point in fact: Zayed Khan's beret and neckerchief:

Honestly, I love this song. All of the music in Yuvvraaj is fantastic (by Oscar winner AR Rahman), which in a movie about the power of music to connect people is a good thing.

Books in August

2009-09-15T13:01:00.000-05:00

Is September the month from hell much? Or is it just me who's crazy busy?

At any rate - books. In August it was three nonfic and four fic books read. The nonfic books were all in the aetheist/freethinker vein.

Letter to a Christian Nation by Sam Harris. Well. I largely agreed with him in content, but not in tone. Those reading this on Blogspot are familiar with the quote that I've put in my banner:

Every time somebody opens their mouth they have an opportunity to do one of two things—connect or divide. Some people inherently divide, and some people inherently connect. Connecting is the most important thing, and actually an easy thing to do. I try to make a connection with someone every time I talk to them, because a connection can be made. People can be treated with respect. I'm shocked that there are so many people that live to divide. - Joss Whedon

Even more to the point, or at least my point is this clip of Joss talking about cultural humanism, which really gets to the core of what I feel, that the enemy of humanism isn't faith:

I fared better with Raising Freethinkers by Dale McGowan. I enjoyed his earlier collection of essays from various people, Parenting Beyond Belief. This is sort of a practical guide on that subject, with lots of books and weblinks for further exploration. And he gets a huge thank you from me for putting secular homeschooling in the spotlight for a moment. We're in the minority, but we do exist!

Your Religion is False by Joel Grus is perhaps even more divisive than Sam Harris, but it's just so damn funny. Grus is an equal opportunity offender. Richard Dawkins often point out that atheists only don't believe in one more god than most folks; Grus runs with that premise, with chapters on all of the religions we don't believe in and why, including the flying spaghetti monster.

And then it was back at the Niven. I read an omnibus of The Magic Goes Away, The Magic Returns, and More Magic. A novella and two short story collections from various writers all set in the same world where magic is going out of the world and it's resetting itself to become the world as we now know it. It's a cool premise. I don't often like fantasy written by sci-fi writers, but these stories I enjoyed. My favorites were "Manaspell" by Dean Ing and "Talisman" by Larry Niven and Dian Girand.

Burning City and Burning Tower by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle are set in the same world. Burning City I liked up until I looked it up on Wikipedia and discovered it's meant to be an allegory about LA riots. Gah, I hate allegory. But I didn't catch the allegorical elements until after the fact, so it can be safely ignored. It's not like LA is the only place where people went batshit crazy and went after their neighbors under indefensible pretexts (I'm looking at you, Partition). Read in that universal sense, I like it. Read as a commentary on just one event, not so much.

Also some of the fantasy elements weren't thought through. If you're going to set a story in ancient CA, make it feel like CA, not like Europe. I was happier when I was wondering what the redwoods were doing in the Mediterranean. Also, there's a moment when a character wonders when someone is going to "turn off" the ocean. Where did he form this concept? And elsewhere someone's drawing is described as "cartoonish". They have cartoons in this world?

Back in the world of sci-fi: The Legacy of Heorot by Niven, Pournelle and Steven Barnes is all kinds of awesome. How has no one ever made this into a movie? Plus there were women here who felt real and complicated and genuine, particularly Carolyn whom no one likes and is sent off on a suicide mission with a bunch of horses and to everyone's shock survives. I liked her immensely. Perhaps just because she was unpopular.

Movies in July

2009-08-27T11:30:00.001-05:00

Well, as it's nearly September my memory is already rusting on some of these...

Started out the month by borrowing a few movies: Aparajito (The Unvanquished) is Satyajit Ray's sequel to Pather Panchali. I love this story; poor Apu is having a very tough life indeed. Sadly this is a trilogy and I can't find the third movie anywhere.

The Golden Fortress is apparently meant to be a children's movie, or so we were told and we watched it with the boys, who were bored out of their minds. Well, it is in Bengali with subtitles with lots and lots of talking. There was a character who turns up near the middle who is a writer of adventure stories (and speaks Hindi; it was exciting for me to all of the sudden understand what someone was saying). He was amusing.

Rang Birangi is another farce where a wife thinks her husband is cheating on her, only he isn't. I've seen this plot done a couple of times in Bollywood and this isn't the best, although there were some jokes specifically about the movie industry and its relative morality which were pretty funny.

Oliver read The Man in the Iron Mask (well, a children's version of it) for history, so I picked up the movie from the library to see how it compared. This one stars Leonardo DiCaprio, Gérard Depardieu, John Malkovich, Gabriel Byrne and Jeremy Irons among others. It is not very much like the book at all. Not a great film, but the aging musketeers are fun, particularly Depardieu's Porthos.

Sticking with the Dumas vein, we also watched The Count of Monte Cristo with James Caviezel and Guy Pearce. This was quite good, beautifully shot with gorgeous costumes and some well executed sword play.

Quin wanted to see The Searchers, the John Ford epic starring John Wayne. Again, gorgeously shot and you can totally see why filmmakers like George Lucas reference it. A bit problematical in the story department, though. While it was nice that in the end John Wayne didn't kill her niece to put her out of her misery or for the sake of their family's honor or whyever exactly he felt that she had to die after living among the Comanches, there was nothing leading up to this complete turnabout in his motivation. It's a rather major change of heart; it would be nice to see what caused it.

One more gorgeously shot movie this month: Jean Renoir's The River, a story about an English family living on the banks of the Ganges. The colors are dreamy. The scene where everyone is napping, the younger children entwined together, is wonderful. Most interesting was the interview with Martin Scorsese that was a bonus feature on the DVD, talking about what it was like to see this movie as a young boy. That man has an infectious enthusiasm, and I love to hear him talk about movies.

I'm a voracious reader of blogs about books and movies, and a lot of what I read and watch I heard first from someone else's blog. The problem is I don't always remember afterwards where I first heard of something. Such is the case with Once, an independent film about a young singer/songwriter in Ireland who befriends a piano-playing woman from Eastern Europe. It's awkward and genuine, and the music in it is amazing. He reminds me a bit of Cat Stevens, perhaps more like a stripped-down Coldplay. This was a cool little nugget of goodness to find, I just wish I remembered who recommended it in the first place.

I watched two more seasons of Two and a Half Men. The writing and acting are sharp. My love of it is only hampered by my deep need for a sense of progression. This is very much comfort TV, where no one really changes no matter how often they seem to get close to it. I guess some folks like that. Me, I'm looking forward to season 4 of How I Met Your Mother.

While Aidan was at camp, Oliver was home alone with me. I had made the decision not to try to get any writing done that week even though we weren't doing school. Oliver was having a tough enough time not having a brother around; Mom couldn't abandon him for the world inside her head too. So it's perhaps ironic that in the middle of that week we watched Coraline, a movie about an only child whose parents are both writers hard at work on separate computers and tuning her out. I didn't like this as well as the book, but it is a visual treat and Oliver enjoyed it (and later Aidan as well).

Do you know what deeply disappointed me? Knowing. I love Alex Proyas, but I think the time has come to admit that he just doesn't have another Dark City in him. Knowing is wonderfully directed; visually cool and the suspenseful scenes had me squirming (he knows when to hold a shot, as opposed to most "more fast cuts the better" directors). But the story sucked ass. It made absolutely no sense. Why didn't the aliens just take the kids they liked and run, why bother with all the math clues? Are there really so many parents still around who don't like having honest conversations with their children? So much could have been simpled up with a single dialogue between Nick Cage and his son. And the movie presents this dichotomy: everything is predetermined or everything is totally, inexplicably random. And Nick Cage's character is supposed to be a foremost thinker in cosmology, but he still believes in this false dichotomy. He speaks of "random" the way creationists do, not the way a scientist does.

Which should have tipped me off, but when the movie ends and the two kids are Adam and Eve I was still deeply pissed off. Lame.

And yeah, that was a spoiler. But you know what? You don't want to see this movie. Trust me. See Dark City instead; now there's a fine bit of filmmaking.

Another Warrior Wisewoman 2 review

2009-08-25T10:07:00.004-05:00

I'm sure I'll have that July movie post up before September. Won't be done revising by then, but on the upside what revising I've done feels really good to me. Of course there's the old caveat from Neil Gaiman which is never far from my mind:

"Feb 13th -- wrote some stuff. It was crap...”
"Feb 14th -- wrote some brilliant stuff. This is going to be such a good novel. Honest it is...”
"Feb 15th -- No, it's crap...”

or alternatively:

“(Writing American Gods) was a bit like wrestling a bear. Some days I was on top. Most days, the bear was on top.”

And I'm on top of the bear at the moment, even if things are going oh so slowly.

At any rate, a new review for WARRIOR WISEWOMAN 2 is up at The Fix. Here's what Ziv Wities has to say about my contribution:

Kate MacLeod give us “Gardens of Wind,” which this reviewer considers one of the standouts of the anthology. Our protagonist Akeli is being pressured to choose a new mate, to a background of war, scarce resources, and life aboard enormous airships. Though the pressure is cruel, there is harsh necessity behind it, starting off the story with immediate tension. As the story flows its course, Akeli finds her solution, which is as sudden and surprising as it is satisfying. Very well done.

Which is where having a critique group really pays off. Because my first ending? Nowhere near as good as my post-critique ending.

Books in July

2009-08-21T12:50:00.002-05:00

Well, I started the month with Niven and Pournelle's Footfall. Like Lucifer's Hammer, I found it overlong with characters I didn't much care about. The aliens, however, were seriously cool. Still, after that I had to take a Niven break.

So I plunged into some nonfic I've had lying around for a while now. Women's Work: The First 20,000 Years by Elizabeth Wayland Barber was a very engaging read. It's about the history of textiles from the advent of string to the Industrial Revolusion, but it also has a lot to say about archaeology and how it's done. I found it interesting on both levels.

A Stranger to History by Aatish Taseer is a memoir by the son of a Pakistani father and an Indian mother who was raised in India by his mother. It's about his journey through Islamic lands starting in Turkey and ending finally in Pakistan, trying to discover what it means to be a "cultural Muslim". It's wonderfully written, explores countries I would love to visit someday but probably never will, and brings to life the people who live there and what they think and feel about their own countries. I got my copy from the UK, though; I'm not sure if this had a US release or not.

How To Win a Cosmic War by Reza Aslan is also about Islam, and about how democracy and personal freedom are good things. Between these two books, I got to thinking about cargo cults, and about how any theocracy can only ever be a large scale cargo cult. You can't know what goes on in someone else's mind, you can't force them to have faith. But you can force them to show outward signs of faith. Which is as effective as making a radio out of coconuts. But then I've always thought secular, pluralist societies were the way to go. Still, these are both books well worth reading.

Back to fiction and YA at that: Unwound by Neal Shusterman had a completely unbelievable premise: that pro-life and pro-choice people would agree to a middle ground of carrying every pregnancy to term, but having the option of scrapping them for parts when they become teenagers (unwinding). Everything that follows on that is well thought out, and the story is fast paced and engaging. I might have liked it more, but I just never bought the premise.

Back to Niven and Pournelle, but in a good way. The Mote in God's Eye I really liked. Niven always does cool aliens, and the moties are top notch. This is worldbuilding at its best, I think, an entire society where all the parts fit so perfectly. The sequel, The Gripping Hand, I liked less well. In terms of plot it followed well from the other, but in The Mote in God's Eye I had quite liked the character of Kevin Renner. He reminded me of Hughes in Full Metal Alchemist; the man content to stay in the background and make sure the right people were in the right places and did the jobs they were meant to do. Plus he was sarcastic/funny. Unfortunately in The Gripping Hand he became just any other Niven main character and I missed my Hughes.

OK, back to writing my own terrible, terrible book. I have it on good authority that when you hate the sound of your own words, it means you're nearly done. Ye gods I hope that's true!

"Oil Fire" is up at Beneath Ceaseless Skies

2009-08-13T09:03:00.004-05:00

You can read it here. I love this magazine; there are a lot of fantastic stories - adventure fantasy but with all sorts of settings. So far I've particularly enjoyed Marie Brennan's "Kingspeaker", K.C. Shaw's "Sand-Skin Man" and Saladin Ahmed's "Where Virtue Lives". My story is in some very fine company.

Here is what I had to say about this story on my website:

"Oil Fire" is a nice example of how ideas mutate over time. After reading Fritz Leiber's Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser stories I was inspired to write something old school sword and sorcery, something similarly buddy-flick (dare I say bromance?) but with two women roaming the world and getting in and out of trouble. It would be nice to write something light and fun, I thought, pulpy but smart. But first I needed back stories...
This was intended to be the origin story for one of my two women, but things began to change in the writing. First of all, she refused to be the POV character, shifting that job to her close friend instead. More than that, the story itself kept taking turns I wasn't expecting but were so much the right ones I had to go with it. I think it's easier to buy two itinerant men wandering the world, but I feel a woman in this time period wandering the world would need a really compelling reason. The one I found for Enanatuma turned out to be quite dark. I've since written her companion Prithvi's origin story, and her reason for being out on her own is if anything darker still.

So my goal of being light and fun got lost along the way (I'm hoping it still reads as pulpy but smart). But I have since had a third character begin whispering her own tale to me, something that plays well off the other two. There's hope yet.
On the Importance of Naming: I actually don't know the meanings of the names in this story. They are all Sumerian, mostly names of kings and queens. I try to avoid using deity names since they come with a lot of baggage (when Prithvi's story gets published you'll hear me gripe about how that wasn't possible in her case - stay tuned).

Fantasist Enterprises: Specials 10 for $100.00 Deal

2009-08-03T10:23:00.002-05:00

One of my first sales was to Fantasist Enterprises, for the FANTASTICAL VISIONS V anthology. Volume IV just came out so I'm up next. In the meantime, they're having a sale on all their books. Check it out!

Fantasist Enterprises: Specials 10 for $100.00 Deal

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Movies in June

2009-07-20T12:44:00.000-05:00

Kind of a lot this month. When the public library is your movie source, it's feast or famine, I guess. Most notably, a lot of these movies are things I've been meaning to see for a long, long time.

First up, the movie version of The Fountainhead. Quin just recently finished reading the novel and wanted to see this. I warned him I'd heard that it sucked. I had heard correctly. Which is strange, as Ayn Rand did the adaptation herself. Apparently she's in love with her character's long speeches to the expense of storytelling. That isn't true of the novel, but when cutting her story down to a Hollywood runtime, that seems to be what she did. Pity. There's got to be a watchable movie that could be made from this source material; I'm surprised no one's tried again.

A movie based on something I haven't read by F. Scott Fitzgerald: The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. I liked it at the time, but a month later it hasn't really stayed with me the way most David Fincher movies do. In fact, I also saw Zodiac for the first time this month and enjoyed that more. Fincher is the master of making you think you've seen some horrible thing you haven't seen. (Like Gwyneth's head in the box in Seven, you have a visceral response to something he didn't even show on film). Zodiac left me with the impression that computers in general and networked ones in particular are a great boon to police work.

I also saw 12 Angry Men for the first time ever, although I've seen so many other references to it I pretty much knew the whole story already. I found it completely engrossing despite that.

I wouldn't say I was dying to see Wild Wild West, but after watching Kevin Smith lay into it in one of his life shows, how could I resist? Yes, there's a giant spider at the end and the whole thing is summer tent pole movie cheesy, but I found it surprisingly fun. Perhaps it's just me being overly generous; there are so few remotely steam punky films out there. Coming in with low expectations helps as well.

Speaking of Kevin Smith, we finished off the DVDs of his live shows with Sold Out: A Threevening with Kevin Smith, which he did in New Jersey. Lots of fun stories from his childhood.

The boys saw the Adam Sandler movie Bedtime Stories some time ago and have been insisting that I watch it. It was OK. Lucy Lawless and Guy Pierce looked like they were having fun. They also saw the Peter Jackson King Kong without me when we first got it on DVD and I never got around to watching it until now. I loved it, gorgeously shot with compelling characters and the giant ape was so wonderfully emotive (thanks to Andy Serkis). This might be another one where it helps to come in with lower expectations, or at least not post-LOTR, Peter Jackson is the king of the world expectations.

Quin and I caught Superbad on cable. I'm a Michael Cera fan, and Seth Rogan had the most perfect cop mustache. Still, glad I didn't pay for this one either.

The Pink Panther 2 was a letdown. We had enjoyed the first one, but this one had replaced Kevin Kline with John Cleese. Not that I don't like John Cleese, but swapping out parts of the cast is never a good sign. Strangely, the mystery story line I thought was very well done and was genuinely interesting, it was the jokes that fell flat. And since this was meant to be a comedy, that's a problem. (If you've seen Aishwarya Rai Bacchan in Doom 2 you'll immediately suspect how the plot is going to turn out, but it's still well-played).

One last item in the "should have seen it years ago" category: Roots, the miniseries. Aidan has been studying the Civil War for history, so this seemed like a nice supplement to that. It's fun to watch now; it's a little encapsulation of which TV stars were hot in the late 70s. The boys both liked it as well; I think Oliver felt a particular kinship to Kunta Kinte. They share a fierce rebellious streak.

The library let me down when I went searching for Satyajit Ray films. They only had Pather Panchali and The Chess Players. I liked them both, although they are very different films. Pather Panchali is the first of three films about a boy in Calcutta named Apu, although this one really focuses on his older sister, a free spirit trapped in poverty. The parents were interesting as well; the father is incapable of worrying about anything, leaving the poor mother to struggle in all sorts of ways to keep her children fed. She was also a bit socially isolated; her body language whenever a neighbor woman would come by to talk to her was fantastic (as someone who also finds friendly chitchat a bit aggressive, I really felt for her). It's a beautifully shot film as well. So is The Chess Players, with an equally engaging cast of characters. The story centers on two men who are always playing chess, to the dismay of one ignored wife and the pleasure of another, elsewhere-occupied wife. While they are busy playing chess, their king is losing his kingdom to the British. I think that's my favorite scene, when the king refuses to sign the documents, but instead takes the crown from his head and hands it over. He's so overwhelmed with emotion, and the gesture is such a symbolic one, and yet the British officers are practically squirming in their discomfort (I'm not saying they're emotionally repressed, but...)

The last film to turn up under Satyajit Ray's name was one where he only provided the music, a Merchant-Ivory film called Shakespeare Wallah. Like Bombay Talkie it's a train wreck of selfish people in relationships. If that's your sort of thing, this is a nice example of it. But I don't care much for films where I want to slap all the characters.

Last of all, a TV on DVD, season 1 of Two and a Half Men, a show my brother has been recommending to me since it first aired. I could tell you how much I liked it, but the real proof is in the fact that my husband, who despises sit coms, keeps finding ways to be doing things in the room when I'm watching this. If you ask him what he thinks he'll just disparage the use of laugh track, but even so he's always there. I'm just saying.

"On Desperate Seas" is up at A Fly in Amber

2009-07-17T22:25:00.004-05:00

...and they've made it their featured piece of fiction for the July issue. Woot! I'm very pleased. If you've never poked around my website, I have a page with little bits of info about the stories I've published: where I got the ideas, or what the names mean, that sort of thing. For instance, here's what I have to say on this piece:

This was a story I had originally intended to submit to Fantasist Enterprises for their Sails and Sorcery anthology. Sadly I missed the deadline (by a couple of months, no less), but that is the reason for the nautical setting. I've always been interested in Arctic and Antarctic explorations, I had just finished Tao of Troth and wasn't done writing about the Inuit, and I had a hankering to try something that invoked a little Poe. Hence the title, although I was specifically thinking of The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket; the careful reader will spot what I borrowed in most respectful homage (or, if you will, outright stole). I had a kernel of an idea that involved a sailor's wife with half a heart, but the story didn't really pull together until a random clicking through Wikipedia turned up this little phrase: "Eventually, more ships and men were lost looking for Franklin than in the expedition itself." and it all pulled together. In an almost unsellable way; this was liked by a lot of places where it just didn't quite fit.
This story is also famous for giving me nightmares while writing it. Some months after I had finished it I saw the NOVA special about the Franklin Expedition; it didn't come close to matching the horror that was going on when I "lived" through it.
On the Importance of Naming: Edgar should be obvious, Penelope is a simple mythological reference, and Jane's name is meant to be the most unassuming name possible, and yet a strong-sounding one. Teddy's Inuit name Tetqataq means "flying before the wind", a lovely name for an Inuit sailor, but also the name of one of the men who came across some of the last of the Franklin men pulling a boat across the ice, trying to walk south to the Back River.
And the title, of course, is a line from Poe's "To Helen". Which in my head will always be read by Tom Hanks.

Books in June

2009-07-14T14:15:00.002-05:00

So it seems like my pattern with Niven is an alterating one between like it/hate it. This month Lucifer's Hammer fell in the "hate it" category. For me, the character I found the most interesting and sympathetic was the comet that smashed into the Earth. Poor comet. The people I mostly didn't care about one way or the other. Tim Hamner and Eileen had an interesting dyamic between them, but there wasn't enough of them to carry me through this too-long novel. (And I could gripe about the women, or the assertion that women's lib ended five minutes after the comet hit, but given that the majority of the black people who survived formed a pseudo-religious cannabilistic group leads me to believe the women got off easy).

Oath of Fealty I really liked, though. The idea of a self-contained city as one giant building is an interesting one, although I wished it had been explored more. I can see the appeal of living in a community where every one is carefully chosen and there is no riff-raff, but what happens in a few generations when some of the descendants become the riff-raff themselves? Will they be booted over the objections of their relatives? Perhaps someday we'll have a sequel to this one; that could be a good read.

I read a few books for research (not even for a novel, just a short story; I've yet to sell enough short stories to earn back what I've spent researching them). Both are books by Pandit Rajmani Tugunait, who has a very readable style and an east-meets-west mentality that suits my purposes exactly. Sakti: The Power In Tantra is really a scholarly look at other texts; texts which I haven't read, as it happens, so I imagine a second, more informed read later in life will be more fruitful for me. More helpful was Tantra Unveiled, a nice overview of a topic much misunderstood in the west.

Rounding off with one more work of fiction: The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins grabbed me at word one and didn't let me go (even at the very cliffhangery end; luckily there's a sequel). This is set in future US where teenagers are chosen by lottery to compete in a Survivor-type game. I don't generally like first person, or present tense. The present tense didn't bother me much here, although I still find it too quirky for the most part. I do wonder if the suspense could have been upped with a multiple POV. When the book is in the first person, and the plot centers on a game where only the victor is still living at the end, you pretty much know who's going to win, present tense or not. Still, it's not the ending so much as how she reaches it that provides the suspense, and this novel had suspense in spades. Highly recommend this one.

And now I'm off to storm the Bastille...

Rest in Peace, Michael Jackson

2009-06-26T09:46:00.004-05:00

I don't have much to say about Michael Jackson that hasn't already been said a thousand times over today; my experience of him is pretty typical of a late-30s middle class American. "Thriller" was one of the first things I saw on MTV, and frankly "Scream" was one of the last (not being a REAL WORLD/ROAD RULES, etc. fan).

But as my husband will tell you I'm a blog-aholic, I read blogs from all over the world, and this morning I've been reading about how people in China are mourning Michael Jackson, people in Japan and Africa. Michael Jackson belonged to the world.

Read Amitabh Bachchan's blog about what it meant to be a Michael Jackson fan back in the day before the internet and You Tube, when the world was not so small as it is today, and music and videos from other parts of the world were harder to come by.

But in particular I like this collection of clips. Michael Jackson was a huge influence to kids all over the world - who didn't want to dance like Michael Jackson? Personally, I like the lawyer-trainee that does a dead-on Michael Jackson dance sequence, and then makes it Bhangra. That's taking a thing and making it your own.

For me the clip that best sums my feelings up is not available on You Tube. It's that sketch from Robot Chicken, when the strange Michael Jackson we've come to know is confronted by the Michael Jackson we all fell in love with back from the "Beat It" days, the original nose, original pigment Michael Jackson. And the strange one turns out to be an alien in space who kidnapped the real Michael so he could take his place. Then the two have a dance-off and the real Michael wins. If only that were true, and we could have our real Michael Jackson back.

Well, enough with the maudlin; I have fictional characters that need torturing now. Back to work.

EDITED TO ADD: The clip is available on the Adult Swim website here. Not the ending I remembered...

This and That

2009-06-24T10:21:00.003-05:00

So I'm on Day 3 of my week off from work and school, pushing as hard as I can to finish the revisions on MITWA. I don't think I'll be done by the end of the week; having revisited my outline before starting my week off, I'm planning to completely rewrite a few chapters and add in six (SIX!) new ones to fill in some gaps or just delve deeper into things that got short shrift in the first draft. Still, progress is progress. My ultimate goal is to finish by the end of July, to prove to myself I can write and revise a novel in a year. That's the usual expection for novelists these days, a book a year, and if I can't do it I don't feel prepared for the next step, getting an agent and pursuing publication. I might give myself a little fudge factor, though. Oliver starts fourth grade math in October and compared to the earlier grades this frees up so much of my time I can expect my productivity to get back to my pre-Oliver in first grade level, or nearly so. I'm looking forward to it; these last three years have been really hard to soldier through.

On the topic of things already published: another review for Warrior Wisewoman 2 has turned up, this one from Nerinedorman. About my story she says:

Although Gardens of Wind by Kate McLeod is a delightful, love story in the face of adversity, I struggled to suspend my disbelief with regards to the science behind the floating cities. This is still a keeper, however. A thumbs up for Kate. She gave me the warm fuzzies with this tale.

It's a fair cop; the airships are believable but the floating villages are a bit harder to buy, I'll admit. I was assuming lots of hot air balloons and pretty much being at the mercy of the winds.

OK, one last thing before I get to work. File this one under awesome, awesome, AWESOME!!

Look, there's my name!

2009-06-16T10:19:00.003-05:00

The Library Journal just reviewed Warrior Wisewoman 2 (it's here, a little more than halfway down the page). This one mentions me! Sure, as one of the "other contributors", but still - that's cool!

In which I state my lack of objection

2009-06-12T10:55:00.000-05:00

All the cool kids are lambasting the casting of the Avatar movie these days. (For my part I'm irked at James Cameron for hogging the name "Avatar", so the movie will just be going by The Last Airbender). What I find most puzzling are the folks that expected Sokka and Katara to be played by Inuit actors. As drawn on the cartoon they both have blue eyes, and they don't have Inuit names (they both sound Japanese to me). I never thought the water benders were meant to be Inuit just because they live in snowy places. Why assume they are Inuit and not, say, Laplanders? I assumed they were meant to be Ainu. But with blue eyes.

To be honest, the idea that the different nations in the world of Avatar are supposed to represent different ethnic groups doesn't make any sense to me. We're talking about a world so small that Gran Gran can leave the Northern Water Tribe to live with the Southern Water Tribe to avoid an arranged marriage. That's moving from pole to pole, and it's not portrayed as any sort of epic journey (actually, they never explain how she did it. Did she have help, or did she paddle her own canoe to the other side of the world all on her lonesome?). How could distinct groups emerge in a world so small, so tightly connected and easily traveled through? The different regions have different clothing and lifestyles, but they all speak the same language. And I think if you stripped them down and removed any culture-specific hairstyling or tattooing you wouldn't be able to tell a Water Tribe person from an Earth Kingdom person.

They do all look Asian, though. I'll admit the casting of Aang gives me pause. But if I were M. Night casting any of these parts I would be looking for 1) someone who can act and 2) someone who can pull off the martial arts. You think it'd be just as easy to find an Asian boy who can do both as a white boy. But I'm not the type to scream "epic fail!"; I'll wait and see the film and judge.

What I am super-geeked about:

Dev Patel as Prince Zuko. Zuko was hands-down my favorite character on the show. He had the complicated arc, and boy did the writers make him suffer and fail before he finally succeeded. (And how sweet is the costuming? I'm already dying to see this movie and it's another year away!).

I'm also pleased with this piece of casting:

Shaun Toub as Uncle Iroh. My second favorite character (and apparently the Avatar character I am). I've liked Toub in everything else I've ever seen him in: Crash and Iron Man most prominently but also Lost, and apparently even Sliders (OK, I don't remember him in that one).

The relationship between Uncle Iroh and Zuko is just so wonderfully nuanced. Particularly in the third season, when Zuko desperately wants someone to just tell him what the right thing to do is, and Iroh says nothing, because Zuko needs to find those answers for himself. After Mako died they used the power of silence in a couple of scenes in really moving ways, even though the guy who took over the voice did it well. Just another cool layer to the show.

It's going to be tough to scale each season of this show to movie-length; I hope these two characters and their relationship doesn't suffer. They have some of my favorite scenes. Like this one:

Uncle Iroh: You're looking at the rare white dragon bush. Its leaves make a tea so delicious it's *heartbreaking!* That, or it's the white jade bush, which is poisonous.

Prince Zuko: We need food, not tea. I'm going fishing.

Uncle Iroh: Hmm... Delectable tea, or deadly poison?

(later)

Uncle Iroh: Zuko, remember that plant that I thought might be tea?

Prince Zuko: You didn't.

Uncle Iroh: I did... and it wasn't. When the rash spreads to my throat I will stop breathing. But look what I found! These are pakui berries, known to cure the poison of the white jade plant. That, or makaola berries that cause blindness.

Movies in May

2009-06-10T13:35:00.000-05:00

Lots of things borrowed this month, from the library or from friends. July is looking to be the return of cash, but in the meantime I did see a bunch of things that didn't suck.

I wonder if Julia Sweeney regrets creating the Pat character? That was one that was funny in very small doses, and it was pretty much the only thing she got to do on SNL. Which is a shame, as she is genuinely funny. I've read a lot of essays and things she's written on aetheism, and parenting without religion, and I know she's done shows on those topics but all I could dig up from the library was God Said Ha!, her monologue about when her brother got sick and eventually died of lymphatic cancer, how her whole family moved into her cute little single-gal-who-likes-her-personal-space house and took it over for the sake of caring for her brother, and about how she got ovarian cancer at the same time. And somehow she finds humor in all that. It's funny and sad and thoughtful, and I really wish I could see more of her shows.

In a similar vein are Kevin Smith's Q & As, An Evening with Kevin Smith and An Evening with Kevin Smith 2: Evening Harder. The man can tell a story. The man can, in fact, tell a hugely inappropriate story about his wife and make it incredibly funny and full of heart all at once. You can see why she would refrain from killing him for over-sharing. I liked the second Evening better, with disc 1 in Canada and disc 2 in England. The crowds there asked better questions, and the little segments out on the street of those towns looking for authentic Canadian cuisine or seeing if Jay's pick-up lines worked on English women were fun.

In the realm of things I did shell out cash for: Zack and Miri Make a Porno. Kevin Smith and Seth Rogan working together? It's all good. I wasn't overwhelmingly impressed with Clerks 2, so I went into this with muted expectations, but it's Smith at his best: funny and raunchy but so full of heart. It's really a romantic comedy, but not one with a "meet cute" and slapsticky misunderstandings. It's much realer than that. The struggle to pay the bills, the deeply shitty car that makes getting to work a job in itself (it is in fact the same car I had when my husband and I first moved in together; and the bit in the deleted scenes where he can't get the door open, and then later when he can't get it shut again - I laughed so hard it hurts. Been there, done that). I can't recall a single thing I've seen Elizabeth Banks in, but she's wonderful here; you believe her as the kind of girl who would be best friends with a guy like Zack. It's a movie about two friends who have known each other forever but are completely out of step with each other in the whole falling in love thing. So yeah I liked it a lot. Although those I'm a Mac/I'm a PC commercials have just gained another layer of amusement in my mind.

The Reader. Nope, didn't like. Wait, that doesn't quite encapsulate it. OK, I fucking hated this movie. How's that? I could give a whole long rant as to why, but this sums up most of my feelings pretty well, particularly the patently manipulative use of Kate Winslet nudity. Imagine if the film had been about an illiterate male Auschwitz guard who deflowered a fifteen-year-old German girl. I doubt the guard in question would be winning an Oscar (I'm picturing Harvey Keitel myself). But at least it wouldn't be a film that was using a naked body to engender sympathy. Or at least that's not the usual response to Harvey Keitel's penis.

(Mostly the movie pissed me off because it made no sense. She has no learning disability, we see this as she teaches herself to read while in prison by listening to Ralph Fiennes reading stories out loud, not an easy trick. But how did she manage to get through life without ever even picking up the word "the", the first word she teaches herself to read? At some point you'd work out that all the stores that sold bread had "Bakery" on them, every bottle of Coca-Cola says Coca-Cola. You have to be willfully not learning to avoid picking up any words at all. Which I suspect was meant to be a metaphor for the German people being willfully ignorant of what Hitler was up to. But as a metaphor it just doesn't work, because it trips up against literacy-not-as-a-metaphor too many times, and as I said it makes no sense. You don't have to know how to read to know that locking people inside a burning building is the wrong thing to do, and it doesn't matter who wrote the report, they all stood there and let it happen. It's possible the novel this is based on makes more sense, but the movie insulted me over and over again. I hate to see fine acting talent wasted, particularly the teenager who played the young Ralph Fiennes, but this movie sucked, sucked, sucked).

Looks like I went on a long rant anyway. Apologies.

OK, I checked out Gone Baby Gone, because who doesn't want to see how Ben Affleck handles directing? I liked this movie, Casey Affleck is terrific, as is the supporting cast. It handled disturbing subject with a delicate touch. This movie didn't make me feel emotionally manipulated. I hope Ben does more films, this one was good.

Gone Baby Gone was based on a novel by Dennis Lehane, so I thought I should check out another film based on one of his novels: Clint Easwood's Mystic River. Kind of a mistake. It's an excellent film, Clint Eastwood is very good at letting actors do their thing and not ruining their performances with an overly-exuberant musical score. All of the actors in this were chillingly good. But this movie upset me deeply, to the point where I actually considered shutting it off. Only I was afraid that the ending I made up in my head would be far worse than what I was about to see and I'd be better off just sticking with the movie. (Which is true, actually, I was so afraid for what Tim Robbins was going to confess there at the river bank that when he finally did tell all it was a relief).

A few days after seeing this movie I came across a quote from G.K. Chesterton on why we believe in fairy tales: “Not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us dragons can be beaten.” Which I think is why movies or stories like this upset me so much. It says there are dragons, and there is absolutely nothing you can do about them.

Black Snake Moan I admit I only picked up because Justin Timberlake is in it. It's set in Memphis, with Samuel L. Jackson as a once-bluesman, now-farmer who finds Christina Ricci drugged out and beaten on the side of the road and takes her home to fix her up, in a lot of senses of that term. It was an interesting film, reminding me a bit of Lost in Translation in the depiction of an atypical relationship between an older man and a younger woman, although Lost for me is hampered like many Woody Allen films are, in that I can't really understand the problems of the idle rich who wander the world trying to find themselves, trying to figure out what useless skill is what they're meant to be doing. Must be tough, she said sarcastically (Alice aside; I liked how that ended with Mia Farrow deciding just not to be the idle rich anymore). Black Snake Moan is sort of the white trash version of that journey, the one where you don't actually go anywhere beyond the borders of your rural stomping grounds because you don't have the gas money. Plus Christina Ricci's character has real problems, the kind that don't have solutions just ways of dealing with them a bit at a time, as Justin's character eventually learns to accept. I liked this movie, there were some fantastic scenes like when Samuel L. Jackson plays his electric guitar during a storm that makes his electricity dim and threaten to go out. It was an eerie and cool effect. But it was a tough movie to get into in the beginning because the tone was so uneven. There were scenes in the beginning that I wasn't sure were meant to be played for laughs or not. (And Christina Ricci is naked here as much as Kate Winslet, but for reasons that actually matter to the story and her character, reasons that make her the opposite of sympathetic at first. The sympathy comes when she stops being physically naked.)

Namesake is the latest from Mira Nair, about a woman who marries, leaves Calcutta for the US and raises her family there, and about her son who's father named him Gogol and his long journey to understanding and owning his own name. Tabu played the mother, and I always love her. She has a gravitas that works well in this part. (She's also a gorgeous dancer, which she doesn't get to show off here, alas). Gogol is played by Kal Penn, whom I sincerely hope hasn't given up acting entirely to work for Barack Obama. He's got this whole smart/funny thing going on that I really like.

(Gogol is the name of a Russian writer, and I'm not going to say why Kal Penn's character is named that, but I will say that there was a point when I was 19 or 20 when Gogol's "The Overcoat" was my favorite story evah, but I had since forgotten about it until I saw this movie. Such is my fickle nature, obsessions come and go. But it was nice to revisit this one.)

Which leaves only my two Bollywood movies for the month. Golmall Returns was amusing when I watched it. I certainly remember laughing and enjoying it. But I can't really recall the plot now. Something about Kareena Kapoor watching too many soaps and suspecting her husband is having an affair, because that's what all the husbands on soaps do. Plus there was a little homage/joke with a prostitute pretending to be Rani's character from Saawariya, I remember that. Hmm. Guess the movie was just a bit of a time-pass.

More memorable was Chandni Chowk to China. Perhaps you remember I was looking forward to this one. Well, it didn't disappoint. It's everything I love about Bollywood, with Akshay Kumar and Deepika Padukone both being so fun and likeable. Plus it's everything I love about the funny sort of kung fu movies, like Shaolin Soccer or Kung Fu Hustle or even Kung Fu Panda. On top of that, it's a genuinely good story, with a main character who has a meaningful arc (his relationship with his deity even matures during the course of the film; how many times have you seen that?). Deepika plays her Indian self as well as her Chinese twin sister, and she pulls it off. There's the requisite band of kung fu henchmen, a long montage set to my new favorite martial arts song (just edging out "Mortal Kombat"), and a very clever fight scene that involves Akshay only thinking he's throwing the punches.

There are actually lots of clips with music and scenes from the movie at YouTube, but they are official from the film company and they won't let me embed the video. (But check out "Chak Lein De" in particular). So this month's video clip is an oldie, from the movie Bichoo. This one is like the siren's call, it lures men to my office. Or one man anyway. Of course he says he's just heading into the laundry room, or to get something from the closet, but I'm not fooled. I know it's really Malaika Arora in tiny skirts. Particularly when she goes "yeah!".

Books in May

2009-06-05T11:29:00.004-05:00

Lots of nonfiction this month, mostly on account of research. And for a short story, not even a novel. Considering how much I get paid for short stories, compared to how much I spend on research books... While, I'm not in it for the money, am I? (I think I'm in it to justify the really cool books I use for "research").

At any rate, Ancient Cities of the Indus Valley Civilization by Jonathan Mark Kenoyer is a great overview of Mohenjo-Daro, Harappa, etc. with lots of photographs of the artifacts. Mohenjo-Daro and the Indus Civilization by Sir John Marshall is older, and reads like it. Many was the night I sat down to "do research" only to be woken up an hour later by some family member asking how the research was going. I've also been working a lot of extra hours, so I can't totally blame Sir John for that, and the book does have a lot of really cool fold-out maps of the buildings. In fact, this book was too massive to read in the bath, which is a large part of why it took so long to finish it (that and the naps).

The Great Partition: The making of India and Pakistan by Yasmin Khan wasn't intended to be research. After watching several movies that dealt with Partition and its fallout I was just curious to connect the dots I already knew. This is an excellent, informative book, an engaging if disturbing read. I was continually reminded of one of my favorite episodes of Angel, "Are You Now or Have You Ever Been", when a Thesulac demon is whispering to the inhabitants of a hotel, playing on their insecurities and feeding on their paranoia until the entire place erupts in violence and Angel is left swinging by his neck from the chandelier. In fantasy worlds, Angel can't die because he's a vampire and slaying the demon takes care of the problem. The real world is no where near that easy to deal with. Whispering paranoia demons are easier to understand than the real world, though, when people just get caught up in paranoia spirals. It's clear from this book that no one involved in the creation of Pakistan as a separate state had any inkling of how bloody a process it would become (and still is).

Blueberry Girl by Neil Gaiman was a nice antitode to that, a picture book of a poem he wrote for Tori Amos' daughter. It reminds me a bit of Rudyard Kipling's "If", filled with all the hope of a young life just starting. Gorgeous illustrations to boot (I even caught Aidan looking at this one on his own).

Two more Larry Niven books this month, both written with Jerry Pournell: Inferno and its sequel Escape from Hell. I enjoyed these, retellings of Dante that only occasionally rubbed me the wrong way (hard to avoid with a topic that by its nature is going to get preachy). I'm not sure how particularly the second one is going to age, some of the references are very current events (will any of us really remember Anna Nicole Smith in 20 years?)

OK, time to get back to teaching math...

It's out in the world!

2009-06-01T12:10:00.004-05:00

Warrior Wisewoman 2 is on sale! You can get a copy at Amazon.com, Barnes and Noble, or at an indie bookstore near you. How geeked am I to see my name on an Amazon.com page? (Answer: very).

Another sale!

2009-05-28T17:54:00.004-05:00

My story "On Desperate Seas" will be appearing in the next issue of the e-zine A Fly in Amber. I'm really pleased; this is one of my favorite things I've done, but being a fantasy story about one of the recovery attempts of the John Franklin Expedition, it's been tricky finding it a home. It's gotten some wonderful rejection letters from editors who loved the writing but just didn't think it fit in with their magazines (which was totally true, but it never hurts to throw things out there). Given that the writing of this story gave me actual nightmares (when you read it you'll probably guess why), I'm glad it's going to be out in the world soon.

Now I just have to finish the one I'm working on now...

Movies in April

2009-05-25T12:35:00.004-05:00

May has been a busy month, both for work and school, and on top of that I've been trying to get a story written (not coming out to bad, either). But since May is nearly over, I think it's about time I finish off this "Movies in April" post.

First up: Slumdog Millionaire. Not remotely a Bollywood film (first clue: all the leads are Muslims. Don't think I've ever seen that in a Bollywood fillm). Not really a hard-hitting films about the slums, either (see Salaam Bombay for that). It is a good Danny Boyle film, though. I've loved his films since the first ten minutes of Shallow Grave. My "honeymoon" was an afternoon at the multiplex, and while I liked Seven Years and Tibet and The Devil's Advocate well enough, it was A Life Less Ordinary that I adored. I don't think Slumdog quite edges that out as my favorite Boyle film (although those honeymoon associations makes it tough for any film to topple it, I think). Loved the music, of course, loved the little Amitabh Bachchan scene (and how cool of Amitabh to play himself there). And I'm super-geeked that Dev Patel is going to be playing Zuko in the Avatar movie. He's so much cooler than Jesse McCartney.

I saw the George Clooney remake of Solaris as soon as it was out on DVD, and a few times since (most sci-fi movies are big on the explosions; quiet, character-driven films like this one are rare but I have a fondness for them). I finally dug up the original Russian version. It was interesting, but I think there was a lot of imagery I wasn't quite grokking, like if I were Russian I would know what the horse wandering around in the background meant. A lot of cool visuals, but I think the Clooney remake took the best of this, tightened it up, and made the female character more interesting and layered.

On the other hand, the remake of The Day The Earth Stood Still blows, and that's coming from a die-hard Keanu Reeves fan. I could appreciate some of the choices they made (particularly making Klaatu a bit of a dick. It was jarring but in a good way). I don't think the director handled the material well at all, though, and how sick am I of environmental cautionary tales? (I wonder if my counterpart in the 50s was as sick of cold war cautionary tales? Probably not at this point; I'm pretty sure TDTESS was one of the first).

And now, a rare movie I saw in the theater! The Soloist, with Robert Downey, Jr. and Jamie Foxx. These are two actors I find awesome in just about anything, but I was worried. The trailers made this look like one of those Person Who Inspires Others To Truly Live types (and yeah, I've linked to that post before, but what can I say? Kumail Ali totally nailed it). I was extremely relieved to see it was much more complicated than that. I do wish the director hadn't used the "world is a harsh, ugly place" visual style where every skin blemish is up there 20 feet tall and all the colors are washed out. I guess it fit the story, but I've seen it used a lot lately and I'm not fond of it.

Thanks to the public library I finally saw North By Northwest. I've since discovered that all of the Hitchcock films have very long wait lists so I'm not the only one digging him lately. It would be senseless to praise this - it's already a classic, what more can I say? - but I suddenly have the hankering to see Mount Rushmore. I've never been, and it's only 8 or 9 hours away. (It also left me with the hankering to watch National Treasure 2 again. I would call that a guilty pleasure, but honestly I liked it better than the last Indy movie).

Speaking of George Clooney (a couple paragraphs back, but...), I saw Syriana for the first time too. Clooney in particular is very good in this. I think Team America ruined me for Matt Damon movies, though. I like him, I think he's a fine actor, but everytime I see him on screen I expect him to put his arms and yell "Matt Damon!"

The Man Who Knew Too Little was a Bill Murray movie I had never even heard of. He made it somewhere in the dead zone between Groundhog Day and Rushmore. It's not a great film, but Bill Murray is just so likeable that even a bad film can be fun (particularly when he's trying to dance like a Cossack).

Much funnier: The Venture Brothers, Season 3. I didn't find this to be quite as good as season 2, but that's setting the bar pretty high; this show is still consistently funnier than just about anything else on TV. But then a show that piles on reference after reference to things from my childhood (Atari, GI Joe, Voltron...), it's pretty much made exactly for me. It's a toss-up on my favorite season 3 line; it's either when the Monarch is trying to make a screen capture and says "oh shit, I made an umlaut", or it's when Doctor Venture is trying to relax in the tub but thinks the fight in the next room is his boys rough-housing and says "this is why Daddy has to drink to relax, boys".

I missed Baron Unterbeit, though. Well, there's always season 4.

Wrapping up with two Bollywood films, Gadar: Ek Prem Katha is a movie set in the Punjab before, during, and after Partition. I've been probably soaking up a bit too much on Partition, lately (as my critique group can tell you, that sort of thing leads to very dark stories). This isn't remotely an historical film; the main character is very Rambo-esque, although he kicks ass while wearing a sweater vest which I found quite endearing. The final chase back to India on the freight train was pretty cool too, and Amrish Puri was in it. He's the bomb in anything (even if his sudden reversal at the end of the film isn't remotely believable).

And lastly, Singh is Kinng, starring Akshay Kumar as a Sikh gangsta. Actually he's a farmer from Punjab named Happy who goes to Sidney, Australia to try to bring a wayward fellow villager named Lucky home and finds himself suddenly made the head of Lucky's gang, ruling the Australian underworld. At first it looks like the gangsta lifestyle will corrupt Happy, but in the end it's Happy who "corrupts" the other ganstas and at the end of the movie they are all really into helping their fellow man. No, not remotely believable, but this movie was just so likeable I went along for the ride.

I'm of course saying gansta and not ganster deliberately; at the point in the movie when Happy takes over the gang and starts livin' large, tell me you totally can't see Puff Daddy hanging with these guys:

The same song plays again over the credits, this time with Snoop Dogg in the mix. Seriously, the real Snoop Dogg did a Bollywood song and video (couldn't find a version that wasn't a little box in the corner when the credits rolled, though).

OK, back to revising my dark tale. At least I'm all caught up on last month now.

I So Identify With This

2009-05-14T09:27:00.003-05:00

"Caring For Your Introvert". Luckily for me I have a husband who totally gets this. Most homeschooling moms need a regular Mom's Night Out (or generally Moms', as they do these things together). But around these parts it's Mom's Night In and the rest of the family leaves the house for a few hours so I can have peace and quiet, alone in my own space.

Right, back at it. I've taken a break from the WIP to write something short (more importantly something Else), but I need to finish it by tomorrow when it's my turn to post to my critique group. Shitty First Draft won't even begin to describe it but at this point just having something done will be a victory.

Books in April

2009-05-13T22:04:00.001-05:00

Most of what I read in April were Larry Niven books. I finished off the Known Space novels with Juggler of Worlds, then proceeded on to Ringworld, The Ringworld Engineers, The Ringworld Throne and Ringworld's Children. The idea for Ringworld is, of course, quite cool, although I don't think he's even scratched the surface of the stories that could be told. I kind of wished he had designed it, then handed it off to another writer to tell stories in. For one thing, for something of such immense size, it seems awfully homogeneous. The different races of hominids just didn't feel as culturally different to me as I think they were meant to. And there isn't much there that isn't hominids. Given that the main activity of all these hominids is to have sex with each other (since they are too genetically different from each other to produce offspring, this is Ringworld birth control), you can kind of guess why there are no sheep.

The other aspect I think he really fumbled was Teela and her "luck". I like the concept of luck, and especially how the Norse dealt with it as "hamingja", where it was a heriditary sort of luck (and related to why the sons of heroes tend to also be heroes in the sagas). But the Ringworld books spend a tremendous amount of time waffling on whether or not Teela was lucky (and it didn't feel like character waffling so much as writer waffling; I suspect Niven didn't even know and was hoping it would become clear as he wrote, only it didn't. To be honest, as a writer I've totally been there. Although I tend to take care of that sort of wishy-washiness in subsequent drafts). He also doesn't make any clear distinction between "luck" and "fate", which I think of as two entirely unrelated concepts. Partly this is just me growing up on comic books where characters like the Scarlet Witch and Longshot were lucky in the sense that they manipulated probabilities moment by moment. Which is what luck would be to me, a moment by moment, the coin keeps flipping heads sort of thing. Fate is something else entirely, bigger than a moment by moment thing.

Basically the idea that Teela's "luck" compelled her to fall in love with Louis Wu to bring her to Ringworld because that's where she was fated to be is just loathsome. Fate putting you on a ship, fine. Fate compelling you to "follow your heart" because you're a chic - ick.

There was a last minute bit of waffling that got interesting - when Louis Wu postulated quite Richard Dawkins Selfish Gene-like that Teela wasn't lucky, it was her genes that were lucky, and that luck only served to lead Teela to have more offspring/replicate more of her lucky genes. But then you realize she only ever had the one kid, and she could have had more on Earth or on one of the other Known Space planets without ever having to "follow her heart" to Ringworld at all that it all sort of falls apart again. I wished he'd thought it through first, wrote it second. It could have been a cool character.

Which is not to say I didn't enjoy the books. Protectors and puppeteers are both cool things. And there was the moment at the end of Ringworld when Teela left Louis Wu for the the Seeker, who in my head was totally the Groosalugg:

Which I totally mentioned lots of times when I was reading these novels, and Quin nodded along as if he understood. Yes, she got her Groosalugg. Yes, that would have been cool for her. Well, I've been rewatching Angel episodes when I'm doing other stuff lately and got to the first Groo episode and pointed it out at one point when Quin was in my office, "Look, it's Groo!"

"Who?"

Yeah, totally just nodding along when I talk.

Sadly, Teela didn't get to live happily ever after with her Groosalugg. But then neither did Cordelia.

The only non-Niven book I read in April was Do Your Ears Pop in Space by space shuttle astronaut R. Mike Mullane. A fun book with lots of interesting info about what it's really like up there in orbit. It didn't add much in the sense of novel research, but I was particularly engrossed with all the details about the Challenger disaster. I remember that day well (I think it's the JFK assasination for my generation; we all know where we were that day). I was home sick from school, and so was my step-dad. He came in to wake me up so I could watch the news reports on the TV. This book really gets into what went wrong, did the crew know something was wrong, could it have been prevented, etc. This came out before the Columbia disaster so there isn't a similar discussion on that mission, which would have been interesting. If you're at all interested in space, this is a highly recommended read.

Warrior Wisewoman 2 reviewed in Publishers Weekly

2009-05-01T14:21:00.003-05:00

The Warrior Wisewoman 2 anthology will be out June 1. This is the one that contains my short story "Gardens of Wind", a sort of boy meets girl story on airships. I wrote it partly because I wanted to write about airships, partly because I wasn't done exploring the idea of uxorilocal marriages (my other two stories with uxorilocal marriages are my two Japanese ones, the two stories of mine that get the nicest rejection letters but still haven't found a home), and partly as an exercise in writing laconic characters (for those that remember, I was musing this over last February). Although the MC in this one, Akeli, goes a bit beyond laconic. She was fun to write, and the setting is one I'd love to revisit someday. Because airships are inherently cool. Just as Hayao Miyazaki.

There is no page up for the anthology yet at Amazon.com, but I do have a link to the cover (I like it, sort of classical Grecoroman and futuristic at once), and a review at Publishers Weekly (you have to scroll down about halfway, past the mystery and into the sci-fi/fantasy releases).

Learning How To Read

2009-04-21T12:31:00.004-05:00

Of all the various parts of homeschooling, the most challenging for me with both boys has been teaching them how to read. It's pretty fundamental, you don't want to screw it up. Both of my boys are now beautiful readers, but at the time they were starting out it was frustrating for me. You see, I can remember learning math, I can remember the tricks I learned that helped me do things in math, but I don't remember learning how to read. As far back as my brain can reach, I always just knew to do it. So I felt pretty useless most of the time with nothing more helpful to offer than "sound it out". Both of them used the same technique that wasn't giving them particularly good results: look at the beginning of the word and the end of the word and guess the rest. Particularly with big words they would do this guessing method.

(For those that get all geeky on curricula like I do and what to know what books I used, for Aidan it was Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons, although we washed out at about lesson 50. We switched to Phonics Pathways and just read a lot of easy readers from the library, which wildly vary in usability (I particularly hate the ones that actually encourage a kid who's learning how to read to guess at words by looking at the pictures. Ugh.). For Oliver I used The Ordinary Parent's Guide to Teaching Reading, which I liked quite a bit. If it has a fault it's been too thorough. It covers enough material to make an 8-year-old's head explode. We still used Phonics Pathways because it's such a nice lead-in the spelling. OK, schoolie geek moment over).

It's hard to recreate the learning how to read experience. I have over my lifetime learned a few other alphabets, but they always can in context of learning a whole other language. The challenge of that really outweighs the challenge of sounding out the words. That, and most languages are a lot more phonetic than English, so you really can just sound them out and get it right on the first try.

About 18 months ago, I started learning Hindi and with it the Devanagari writing system. Which is really elegant and easy to learn. As I said, once you know what the letters are you can just sound it out:

मुझे आइस क्रीम पसन्द है

But I was learning the language at the same time as the letters so I could sound it out, but I still had to look everything up. It was hard to gauge there how my brain was processing just the reading. Fast forward to just after Christmas time. I have a shiny new Teach Yourself Urdu book. Urdu is the language of Pakistan and is nearly identical to Hindi. There are more Persians words and fewer Sanskrit ones, but the main difference is that Urdu isn't written in Devanagari, it's written in a modified Arabic script. And it's so beautiful you can see why they use it for decoration:

مجھےآس کريم پسند ہے

(It's looks prettier written than typed. And not in my writing; my penmanship in any language is severely challenged).

This was a new experience for me, learning how to read a language in which I already had a working vocabulary of about 2500 words (everything in a beginner's book like this one plus some extra). I had the chance now to observe my own skills at learning how to read. And do you know what I caught myself doing?

Looking at the beginnings of words and looking at the ends of words and guessing what comes between. *Sigh* My guessing was better than theirs, surely, but only because I'm dealing with a much smaller pool of potential guesses. Although it would help their technique if they would only guess words that actually made sense with the sentence they're reading.

(Both the sentences above say "I like ice cream." Which, aside from being true, I picked because it was sentences like this that always tickled me when I was in the early, carefully sound out each character phase. It says "mujhe ais kreem pasand hai". Imagine sounding it out: "ai-s kr-ee-m, oh hey, that says ice cream!" Don't you just love loan words?)

Movies in March

2009-04-15T13:50:00.001-05:00

Being cash-strapped I've taken to checking out DVDs from the library, which always involves a wait and they don't have a particularly good way of browsing. You pretty much have to know what you want and see if they've got it. Still, free.

I got The Footlight Parade just to see the synchronized swimming number. I was surprised to see James Cagney in it; I associate him so much with gangster roles that I wasn't expecting to find him in a musical. He and the actress who played his secretary had a nice rapport, and I enjoyed this movie (although the synochronized swimming segment did inspire a bit of cattiness, pointing out who wasn't where she was supposed to be).

His Girl Friday was fun as well. This movie I've heard praised all over for its sharp dialogue, and it has that in spades.

Gandhi we watched together as family, sort of. Oliver conked out 20 minutes in and slept for the last 2 hours of movie (I blame the layer cake. We don't eat much sugar around these parts, and when we do it knocks us all out). I'd never seen this movie before (although I've seen a couple of movies about Bhaghat Singh). I was surprised by how much Aidan enjoyed it, but it really made an impression on him. It's been a bit more than a month since we watched it and he's still talking about things Gandhi said and did.

Freaky Friday we caught on TV, the remake with Jamie Lee Curtis and Lindsey Lohan. I'd never seen the original although I read a book version once in middle school. This was another one that Aidan really liked. I thought the two actresses did a terrific job of being each other. It's kind of a shame that these days Lindsey Lohan is mostly famous for being famous; she had the chops to go another way, I think.

Flyboys was a movie the rest of the family had already watched before but for some reason thought that I would want to see it (actually, I think that reason might be named James Franco). I'm not saying this movie is predictable, but I did amuse my boys by accurately guessing every plot twist and often paraphrasing the actual dialogue before it was spoken. I think it was the point where Franco's character and another guy crashlanded and I foresaw waking up in a whorehouse, meeting a girl he liked, and having that girl turn out not to be a whore because heroes don't fall for whores that really put it over the top. Apparently the planes aren't particularly accurate either, although that's more my husband's realm of expertise rather than mine. There is clearly a good movie to be made about these pillots, a Band of Brothers type movie about what it was really like. This isn't it. (Although it's hard to truly hate a movie where someone kamikazes a German Zeppelin).

I had a few things on preorder from Amazon.com that came this month as well. Baz Luhrmann's Australia I thoroughly enjoyed. After reading the description on the back of the box I was worried, it sounded like it would be kinda hokey, but it was just so perfect. And the kid playing the lead role of the half-aborigine orphan had such a wonderfully expressive face. Plus, Hugh Jackman. Can't go wrong with Hugh Jackman.

Quantum of Solace was just as awesome as I had been told.

BSG Season 4.0, being the first half of the fourth season. I'm starting to get a bad feeling for where all this is going. And as much as I dutifully avoid spoilers for this show and Lost, I've caught the phrase "deus ex machina" a few too many times in blogs about how the season wrapped up. I can see where a religion focused on total forgiveness (and in particular the you, like Kevin Bacon in Murder in the First, were just a tool/weapon defense) would appeal to Gaius Baltar. And I always love how he starts out conning others and inevitably ends up believing his own con (his character is the core of the show for me). But I don't see how this religion is going to appeal to the thousands of other survivors. I don't see how it's going to provide the sort of meaning they would be looking for, to put what happened to them in context. I wished it had been thought through just a little bit more.

Lastly I'll mention Sita Sings the Blues, a truly wonderful piece of filmmaking. It's a shame that legal snafus kept this out of theaters (and out of award consideration), but on the plus side, we can all see it for free on the internet. (It's here). I love the story. It's just my sort of thing, someone in the present finding deep personal meaning in a very old story, in this case the Ramayan. And I love the different animations she uses for the different aspects of the story, the squigglevision for the present day, the Mughal-style paintings from the Ramayan reenactments, the Betty Boop style for the depression-era songs. But my favorite are the shadow puppets who represent her three friends trying to remember the details of the story with much debating and correcting. The boys liked this one too, well enough to ask to see it again.

So this month's video segment is from Sita Sings the Blues. I loved the "Agni Pariksha (Sita's Fire)" segment the best but can't find a clip of just that bit on YouTube. (It is here, but you have to skip up to 7:20 to see it). In the meantime, here is the opening. I love how all the Hindu imagery is used without any explanation. It's fascinating even if you don't know quite what it all means:

My most popular post EVAH

2009-04-10T11:37:00.004-05:00

Is this one: http://macleod424.blogspot.com/2006/12/for-fans-of-avatar-last-airbender-only.html. It gets multiple hits every day from Google Images. Which is kind of funny. A few of them even click around and look at some other posts. So welcome, fans of Avatar, or just fans of Uncle Iroh.

Now I'm off to have some tea, and then it's back to the novel revisions. Hoping to be done before May (*fingers crossed*).

Books in March

2009-04-10T11:00:00.001-05:00

Mostly Niven this month, namely: Protector, Tales of Known Space, The Shape of Space, The Long ARM of Gil Hamilton, The Patchwork Girl, Flatlander, and Fleet of Worlds. A few of these were story collections that had some overlap (Flatlander, for instance, contains all the stories from Long ARM plus the novella The Patchwork Girl plus one extra, very minor Gil Hamilton story). I like Niven less the more I read. The ideas are cool but the characters completely fail to engage me. Too many women with stripper names (Feather, Taffy, Teela, ugh). Both the Kzin and the Puppeteers are races where only the males are sentient - what's up with that? I'm hoping as I go that there's an explanation for that amazing coincidence, because otherwise it's just plain hateful.

Mostly I'm grumpy because Jo Walton at Tor.com is re-reading all of Lois McMaster Bujold's Vorkosigan books and she's giving me an itch to do the same. I think I'll make that my reward for persevering with my goal to read all Niven.

I also read two more books on slums (novel research). Shadow Cities: A Billion Squatters, A New Urban World is by Robert Neuwirth, who spent months living in the squatter communities of Mumbai, Rio de Janeiro, Nairobi and Istanbul. This book was very interesting and an eye-opener. For one, he advocates calling them squatter communities and not slums, and I can see his point. Many of these places don't really deserve the term "slum" for one, but on the other hand thinking of them as squatters puts them in an historical context (and Neuwirth does, with stories of how the US was shaped by squatters). Highly recommend this one.

Planet of Slums by Mike Davis was also completely engrossing but deeply upsetting, both for its descriptions of what life is like in these places but also for how little hope there is for change (he details exactly how every prior effort to fix things has mostly benefited the wrong people and made life worse for those they were meant to help). A good book, but not a particularly empowering one.

He's been purified in the waters of Lake Minnetonka...

2009-03-27T12:12:00.004-05:00

... and now he's cleaning up on Jeopardy! Fred Beukema, that is, he of the yearly Beukemixes which we all adore around these parts. He's won two games already and is playing game 3 today. (Since 4:30 is perhaps the most inconvenient time of day for me to sit in front of the TV I've finally had occasion to use the recording capacity of my PC. I grossly overestimated the amount of TV I care to record anymore when I bought the thing. At any rate, it works pretty slick.)

Fred put a lot of work into preparing to be on the show (he documents it pretty thoroughly on his blog), and as Quin has mentioned mmmph times, Fred was always his chief competitor at the Isaac Asimov superquiz when they worked together. This is very much his sort of thing. It's fun to watch someone you know, especially when he's doing so phenomenally well (in both of the first two games Fred went into Final Jeopardy with a score more than double the second place contestant's, so he couldn't lose unless he deliberately bet a huge amount on the FJ question. And as you can tell from the Daily Doubles, Fred is a conservative better). It seemed like the perfect opportunity to bet $Texas and answer "Suck it Trebek", but they probably screen for that sort of behaviour before they let you on the show.

So congrats to Fred! I'd say good luck in game 3, but since it was a done deal weeks ago that would either involve some sort of time machine or some very careful verb conjugations (future perfect tense, maybe?)

(The title of this post makes sense if you watch his Hometown Howdie, but that link will only work for a few days).

Why on Earth did this song just pop into my head today?

2009-03-25T11:06:00.004-05:00

Perhaps it's because I'm eagerly awaiting the arrival of Quantum of Solace. Who knows?

Damn Paul McCartney and his catchy tunes; I'm going to be singing this for the rest of the week...

I wonder if this movie holds up? I remember liking it at the time, but maybe there's a reason I've never caught it on cable. Then again, they played Summer Rental with John Candy a dozen times last month, and that wasn't exactly laugh-a-minute.

Well, back to singing while I work...

Movies in February

2009-03-17T14:56:00.000-05:00

Not much movie watching in February. This is largely because 1) I really was too sick to bother and 2) getting a new furnace, AC and water heater all at a blow took quite a bite out of my cash flow. (Wait, is that a mixed metaphor? Blow, bite, flow... maybe). So I'm relying on rewatching all faves plus perusing what's available at the library. But February was when I polished off my Christmas/birthday haul. So...

First up: Vicky Cristina Barcelona. My husband is a big fan of both Woody Allen and Scarlett Johansson, so he thoroughly enjoyed this. I suspect it was a movie only made because Woody wanted to see Scarlett and Penelope Cruz kissing... As with most of Woody's work, I wished he'd spent more time on it. It's an intriguing idea that feels only half thought through. And it shares a complaint I have with a lot of his work; in the end, his characters have changed not a whit due to everything that's been going on over the last 90 minutes. Which gets frustrating. But he writes such good scenes, particularly here the scenes where Penelope is ranting in mile-a-minute Spanish while Javier Bardem tries to simultaneously calm her down and apologise to the non-Spanish-speaking Scarlett (at one point messing it all up and apologising to Scarlett in Spanish). I'd say Penelope earned her Oscar, it really was a great part, but the movie as a whole felt rather slight.

My only other English (mostly) language film was Mississippi Masala, one of Mira Nair's earlier films. It's about an Indian family from Uganda who is living in a hotel in Mississippi, and more specifically about the daughter who breaks away from her family to be with Denzel Washington (who wouldn't?). I loved the look of the film; it felt like a sweltering hot Southern summer, which is nice when it's actually the last dregs of a Minnesota winter.

I watched the last two movies in my Bollywood stash as well: Aryan and The Jewel Thief. Aryan I was a bit nervous about; the cover with Sohail Khan as a boxer made me expect lots of bloody fist fighting a la I Proud to be Indian, but it's actually the story of two young people who both have to adjust when they get pregnant and then married. The songs weren't great, but the movie was heartfelt and I enjoyed it. The Jewel Thief is old school Bollywood (it's from 1967). I like these old films, and this one is very early Bond, very 60s. I don't believe this is a Bollywood retelling of any Hollywood film; certainly the plot twists all came as a complete surprise. Great story, but really fun for the look of the thing. (Honestly, there are enough of these sorts of films I'm surprised there isn't a Bollywood Austin Powers to really revel in it.)

TV on DVD: I watched seaons 1 and 2 of Torchwood, which I also enjoyed immensely, although Quin not so much. I don't think it was the rampant bisexuality that bothered him; it was the "Dr. Whooey quality" that he kept griping about. I found some of the plots a bit Buffyesque (or Angelesque), but when they actually put James Marters on the show, I can totally forgive that. Cause he's awesome.

Lastly is Full Metal Alchemist. I actually only watched Season 1 in February, but having since watched Season 2 plus the film The Conqueror of Shamballa I'll deal with them all together. I loved this show. I loved the worldbuilding, the rules of alchemy and how they were used or how they were worked around; I loved the vast cast of characters (this show has surely spawned mountains of fanfic and slashfic). The animation has that lovely attention to detail that good anime always has. My only disappointment is that it was just a bit too intense, too violent to share this with my boys. Which is a pity; the show focuses on two brothers who squabble and fight like real brothers but still really rely on each other. The bond between them is the bedrock of the show. But alas, there were too many things that would be upsetting for a few years yet. And it's not something that can be edited around; the things that happen are integral to the plot, or are disturbing for psychological more than gory reasons. So it's violent, but not gratuitously violent. I would highly, highly recommend checking it out for teens and up, though.

I understand that like with Samurai Champloo and Cowboy Bebop, the associated manga tells an entirely different story with the same cast of characters (although unlike those two the FMA manga came first). I'll have to check that out when I have the cash. Also like those two, the music featured in the show is wonderful. Cowboy Bebop is far and away the best of the three for music (and it would be impossible to summarize just what that music is, it's so all over the map). Samurai Champloo was very hiphop inspired. FMA goes more for pure Jap pop, which I love, particularly this track, which sounds like a Japanese Go-Gos doing disco (love that bass line...)

Books in February

2009-03-13T15:54:00.000-05:00

I only read six books in February, and three I'd already read before (although it was about ten years ago).

First up: Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found by Suketu Mehta. A very interesting look at several different people's lives in Mumbai. I first heard about this book on a show on PBS (I keep catching this show about life in India but never catching the title, which tends to happen when you're not the one with the remote), and I also read a piece he had written about Mumbai after the attacks last November, so this book has been on my radar for a while. Mehta was born in Mumbai, grew up in New York, then moved back to Mumbai as an adult, so he has a split perspective; he's both a native and an outsider at the same time. Mumbai is a very interesting city: it's the size of New York City and LA together in terms of population and if you look at it on Google Earth it's very easy to spot the slums, where everything is packed in so tight together and stops mere feet from the train tracks. (My fascination with slums has a lot in common with my fascination with the life of the Inuit which I researched for my last novel; I'm amazed at how much they can do with so little, but also saddened, because no one should have to get by with so little). I found this book honest and unflinching about the good and the bad, but in the end I found it hopeful about the future. And it struck me as I read that many of the problems in Mumbai were reminding me very strongly of what I was reading just a few months ago about New York City at the time of Teddy Roosevelt. (Which reminds me, apparently I owe the movie Garv a huge apology. I found the police force shooting on sight gangsters they had been sent to arrest because they knew they would never be justly tried in the courts implausible, when it is in fact quite true.)

Light at the End of the World by Wade Davis is a collection of essays on different cultures around the world. Apparently these originally appeared as part of a collection of photographs, and I rather wished I had hunted that book down; I would love to see some of the things described here. It was a bit of a mind twist after reading a book about India to follow it up with a book where "Indian" means Native American, though.

The Sharing Knife: Horizon is the latest by Lois McMaster Bujold. It's the best of the series so far, and yes I said that about the last one as well. It's just the story keeps going deeper, and the canvas it's told on keeps getting wider. This, frankly, is why I love reading series. And I have no idea where she's going to take these characters next, but I bet it's somewhere I could never predict.

OK, I finished off the month with Larry Niven. I've read some of him before (as I mentioned, it was more than a decade ago). I couldn't really pick out which ones I had though, so for the sake of completeness I started with the oldest Known Space books, and the first three are all ones I'd read before: World of Ptavvs, A Gift from Earth and Neutron Star. World of Ptavvs would be my favorite of these three, if just for the moment when the real alien wakes up (if you've read the book, you know what I mean. That moment, just there, is awesome).

In all likelihood, March will be nothing but Larry Niven books. I hope you're prepared...

So, been sick...

2009-03-05T23:44:00.004-06:00

... as those of you on Myspace or Facebook already know. Haven't been that sick in ages. It started as one thing and then became one or two others; that's all I'm gonna say. I had to get out of bed yesterday because our new furnace/air conditioner/water heater were all installed, but I wasn't exactly lucid; I kept conking out on the couch and the installers would have to wake me up to ask me questions or show me things. (One of them said to Oliver "Your mom sure is sleepy!" to which he said... nothing, because the boy won't talk to strangers unless he's trying to out-talk his brother). And when I went downstairs to look over the finished work, my very addled brain came up with "shiny" as my only comment. And I think they thought I was talking about the lustre when I'm pretty sure my brain was talking Firefly-speak. Heck, I was so out of it I probably was just finding it, you know, shiny.

So no writing done on my week of school break, and most of this week's school was a wash as well. We kept up on math and that's about it. And my movie and book posts will be unusually short as well; I really was quite out of it the last half of February. When I wasn't just flat-out asleep I couldn't handle anything more complex than music DVDs. So it's cool that I have a ton of those. For instance, can you believe this concert was already a decade ago?

I would love to see an NSYNC reunion tour (with CD of new material as well, please). They put on such a show. And you know, they take their work seriously but never themselves, and there's something to be said for that.

And that's not just the fever hangover talking...