Books in March

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

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

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.

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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?)

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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).

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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...
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...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.

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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:

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"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

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

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"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

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

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

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

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

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

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?

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

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

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

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

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!)

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!)

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!)

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!)

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

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.

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But I suppose that's just me.