What do we want? Strong female characters! What do we mean? I'm glad you asked...

How the time goes by. One may justly ask me what I’ve been doing lately instead of blogging. Well, I’ve been watching TV. I’ve been working. I’ve been reading my friend Elinor Diamond’s blog.

I had the neat opportunity to write a guest post for Ms Diamond, and that should be going up today. If you’re interested in some observations of mine on narrative voice and the reader’s place in a story, check it out there.

Meanwhile, Ms Diamond’s recent post opining on “strong female characters” has caused me to start opining in turn.

As she pointed out, the concept of the “strong female character” has drawn some fire lately. Once we started talking about SFCs as something that should exist—perhaps something that writers should be applauded for creating—writers naturally started trying to create SFCs in larger quantities. Yet as a general rule, more people want to be applauded than actually want to do something they find difficult. The result has been a glut of SFC-bait—characters who we’re supposed to appreciate as progressive but who don’t actually do the women of the world any favors.

Part of the problem is people misunderstanding the meaning of “strong.” Maybe it’s not entirely fair to blame them, because when we call for “strong female characters” I don’t think that’s precisely what we mean (I’ll get to that later). But those of us who call for SFCs in media are not (I hope) satisfied with female characters who are merely muscular, merely violent, merely invincible,* merely obnoxious, or who are active when surrounded by minor characters but become passive when they interact with the main (male) cast.

I don’t think we should publicly abandon the idea of the strong female character. It would be a shame if the idea fell out of style without achieving its purpose (or worse, because it had been terminally derailed). But we need to ask some clarifying questions.

People have already been asking what qualifies as a “strong female character.” Precisely, when we demand SFCs in our media, what exactly are we asking for?

I think, as a general rule, what we (I?) really want to see is female characters who shape the story according to their own motivations. That’s what I would call “narrative strength.”**

Some of the better examples from media I’ve recently ingested aren’t exactly egalitarian. Having finished the first season of the new House of Cards, I find Zoe Barnes an interesting liminal case. I actually argued with Girlfriend about whether or not she qualified, but I think if she isn’t an SFC, then the dividing line passes very close to her. I’m going to try to break down the case for her without significant spoilers.

Zoe’s ambition is a major force in the show. Only one other female character competes with her in terms of narrative influence, and in my opinion Zoe is the more influential. She certainly overwhelms the influence of the other characters in her own sphere. It’s only up against Frank, our main character/villain, that she’s clearly in over her head.

That may be the first objection raised against Zoe’s status as an SFC—that the strongest male character in the show exerts so much power over her—but I would argue a key distinction. She doesn’t fade into the woodwork when she shares the screen with Frank—instead, the struggle between Frank and Zoe is one of the main elements of the story. As for her being in over her head, if we respect the characters we write we must allow them to get into trouble. A protagonist certainly needs enough rope to hang themselves with, and Zoe takes her turns as protagonist.

A stronger objection may be the way she works for her goals. She trades on her gender, both offering sex and using gender politics as a bludgeon when one or the other will get her what she wants. It’s not exactly role-model behavior. It’s less of an issue in a show like House of Cards, where the morally uncompromised are a vanishing minority, and a character doesn’t need to be sympathetic to be narratively strong.

Maybe this highlights a shortcoming of the term “strong female character,” though. After all, a media universe filled with “strong” women who trade primarily on their sexuality would be a pretty regressive one, even if those women exerted disproportionate influence on their stories. But the problem of whether we should depict this sort of thing at all turns into two questions, and I’m a little afraid to chase them down because of how long this post is getting already. I’ll make a go of it, though.

The first question: What means can a strong female character use to get what she wants? Must she be a role model? I think girls deserve to see female characters in media who use a variety of empowering means to achieve their goals, but I don’t think media for adults*** can afford to completely ignore that women have certain disadvantages in our society, and a few “dirty tricks” that they can use to get ahead if their goals are bigger than the accepted means at their disposal.

The second question: Are strong female characters descriptive or aspirational? That is, are we showing the world as we see it, or are we showing the world as we want it to be in hopes that life will imitate art? I think the truth for creators is usually a little of both. But what are we asking creators to do when we ask for SFCs? To show us what women can do of in this world, or to show us what women should be able to do in a better one? (How strong a distinction this is is a function of your setting and your worldview.)

As a creator, I think at some point you need to be honest with your characters. They can’t come alive as long as they’re artificially constrained by a lesson we want them to teach. They need to pursue their own goals as they see fit, with the means available to them.

Of course all of this hair-splitting would be less necessary if there were more active female characters in media. We can’t really be honest with characters until we don’t feel the need to make them representative of anything other than themselves.

* Admittedly, we’ve been dealing for centuries with male characters with no personality outside of their proficiency with violence, but writers don’t expect a pat on the head for writing them.

** This isn’t to completely ignore egalitarian portrayals of women—that is, women in traditionally masculine roles: warriors, leaders, any job that usually ends with “-man.” But 1) that’s not exactly the cutting edge of 21st-Century progress, and 2) doing it lazily leads to tokenism. Independent goals and narrative agency are the antidote.

*** If your little girl is watching House of Cards then the portrayal of women in media probably isn’t her biggest obstacle to success.

Advent, Christmas, Fimbulwinter, Epiphany

Where to begin? Not with another apology for letting my blog languish so long, I hope.

Immediately before I left for a long Christmas vacation, my trusty laptop went kaput. I ordered a new laptop, which I had shipped to where I would be on Christmas Eve, and alternated between packing and file recovery the next day. Everything important was saved, I'm pleased to say. What wasn't important wasn't lost--I just haven't bothered moving everything off the old computer because the process is a pain. But all my writing and work files are here, and I didn't have to worry for very long that they were irretrievable.

Since I had just wrapped up a big project that had to be out before Christmas, and I hadn't lined up any work for the week I would be on vacation, being without a computer was almost relaxing. It gave me more time to relax and really focus on the things that are important in life, like food, naps, movies, and presents.

I came home with a supply of good literature (Stephen King's special extra-long edition of The Stand), good games (the first season of Telltale Games' The Walking Dead, as well as the lost trove of my Super Nintendo titles finally uncovered by my dutiful sister in exchange for custody of the N64 and its games*), good music (Florence + the Machine's album "Lungs," which provided the soundtrack for the drives between New York and Philadelphia), a great movie (Akira Kurosawa's Seven Samurai), good chocolate, and two bottles of Sky River mead, one of a handful of Pacific Northwest beverages that I miss almost as much as my friends who still live there.**

If you've read the news about as much as I have, you've probably noticed that it's cold all over the place. That includes here in Maryland, and although I don't claim to be nearly as hard off as folks in the Midwest, or the folks who recently had to get rescued off an Antarctic research boat, or the people who just had to be rescued off the boat that rescued those people. But it's pretty cold here, and by "here" I mean "inside."

As it happens, my contentious downstairs housemates moved out on New Year's Eve. And it turned out that they called the gas company as they moved out and had the gas shut off. Do I know why? No. Am I going to speculate about their motives or possible negligence in a public forum? Heck no. Can I see my own breath in the dining room? Yes.

If Pepco is as good as its word, this will be sorted out on Monday, which will be very nice. In the meantime, Girlfriend and I have been keeping very close to our favorite space heater.

Not that I want to complain, or, more correctly, not that I want to complain any more. I am not nearly as miserable about the situation as you might think I have right to be. But a maxim I'm coming to believe--and one I beg everyone not to abuse--is that if a situation must be bad it behooves it to also be interesting. It also helps to spend the time in good company, and I suspect I would be a great deal grouchier about this if the school year had resumed on the second.

* If playing Dungeons & Dragons has taught me anything, it's that people will delve for your lost treasure and fight the necessary monsters for you if you let them in exchange for a share of the loot.

** Hey, I said "almost."

A haul of books

I doubt I will ever forgive this area for its lack of bookstores. When I lived in Seattle you couldn't swing a sack of spiders without hitting a used book store. You could not walk down the street with certain people (who you love very much) without being pulled aside into a bookstore for an indeterminate period. (If the store was Twice Sold Tales*, which had cats, your day was pretty much spoken for.)

Living in the University District of Seattle, it seemed natural to be surrounded by entertainments for literate folks. One would expect no less of College Park, Maryland, the municipal albumen of the University of Maryland**. Indeed, the only book store in apparent striking distance of my new place (or for that matter my old place, a stop south on the green line, in Hyattsville) was the UMD college bookstore. The only time I can recall going in there was to buy a board game, of which they had plenty--I don't recall them selling any books although I'm sure there must have been one or two. Anyway, that's gone now too. They uprooted to relocate and, like a demon eight miles from a suitable host, vanished quietly from the mortal realm.

There is a library nearby. The Hyattsville library is actually quite nice, even if it's a bit of a walk away now--but then I learn that it's to be closed for complete destruction and rebuilding soon. I don't know what makes that necessary, and apparently I'm not the only person who isn't in a hurry to see the place torn down.

But I didn't come here to complain about that. It happened that the church which I have recently (if sporadically) been attending had a used book sale, and Girlfriend and I resolved to descend upon it like locusts. As she has a classroom library to stock, she did the most damage, but I am pleased with what I turned up for myself.

I picked up the February 1989 issue of Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction, apparently the only issue which had been donated. The stories in it would have been current when I was four years old, and I certainly wonder what the genre was like at the time, when the internet was nascent and the Hubble Telescope was still being put together.

I found a large hardcover collection of Dashiell Hammett novels, and I hope to get in touch with some of the stories that I know from retelling and pastiche. One, Red Harvest, is a story that comes up again and again (in Yojimbo, A Fistful of Dollars, Last Man Standing, arguably the Conan the Barbarian story "Red Nails," and other, less notable iterations), and which I may try my own hand at if I get around to it.

Perhaps the most interesting find of the day was The Thorough-Bred Poor Gentleman's Book; or, How to Live in London on £100 a Year, a reprint of a slim handbook from 1835 which is essentially what the title claims: a guide to living frugally as a gentleman. It has that offhand wit that seems to happen naturally in books over a century old, but also seems to be a legitimate study in the plight of the declining English nobility in the 19th century. What a dilemma is is, surely, to be constrained in one's income and to be "above" doing anything for oneself--never mind taking definite action to earn more money!

What's said is interesting. What's not said is perhaps more so. One piece of straightforward advice reads: "Never get into a cab or hackney-coach when you can possibly walk." But it is never suggested that you would consider eating fewer than two meals a day outside your own home, make your own bed, or wash your own clothes--although you may apparently brush your own clothes without demeaning yourself, and the maidservant will appreciate it.

It makes me appreciate the freedom of the middle class, to eat my own spaghetti on occasion and do my own laundry without being thought less of.

This, of course, is part of the pleasure of used book sales as opposed to your typical bookstore. Foraging encourages a varied diet.

* Now, sadly, a Chase bank.
** Which this year broke into Playboy Magazine's list of America's top 10 party schools, wouldn't you know.

Of Foxes, Whedons, and agents on the inside

I have been watching Dollhouse at a remarkable pace. Halfway into the second season (or 3/4 through what would have been a regular season of another show) I come to a question that has been asked many times before.

Why would Fox keep cancelling Joss Whedon's series?* I have heard the theories. The suits at Fox are idiots, the common theory runs. With Firefly, and then Dollhouse, their increasingly atrophied senses of taste responded to masterful storytelling as the deepest of cave fungi respond to the light of the sun. It was terrible and incomprehensible to them, so they sought to extinguish it.

Well, that theodicy satisfies some geeks, but in my paranoid ramblings I've come to a theory of my own. And I'm going to lay it on you after the jump.

Warning: This is probably going to contain vague spoilers for Buffy: The Vampire Slayer, Firefly, Serenity, and the first season of Dollhouse. But then, if I'm right, it could contain spoilers for everything.

Marriage, mice, and manuscripts

There are three kinds of sequel, although for the purpose of introducing this post I'm going to ignore the correct definition of "something which follows or continues" and focus instead on the more common usage, as "a rehashing of ideas previously explored to their logical conclusion."

So, there are two kinds of sequels, generally: those which improve or expand on their originals and those which fall short. Terminator 2 on the one hand, Speed 2 on the other. In terms of the themes it addresses, this post may be considered a sequel to the previous one, and in that regard I hope it falls into the former category rather than the latter.

A week ago I came home from the wedding which had occupied my time, one way or another, for the whole week previous. The wedding was successful, and a married couple was produced. The accompanying party was perfectly lovely (and on a boat, no less), marred only by one of the groomsmen reading a rambling speech made up mostly of in-jokes.* My friends continue to show a talent for having relatively sane and enjoyable weddings, and the weather in Seattle even cooperated to the extent that it was sunny when it needed to be.*

Before leaving I had been relieved to discover no evidence of bedbugs in the house. On my return we continued to not have bedbugs, much to our relief. When I stepped into the kitchen, however, I startled a mouse who must have thought he had the place to himself.

You would think, given the geometric way that these problems expand, that exterminators would make appointments on very short notice. This does not seem to be the case, however--at least not with the exterminator who our landlord prefers. We eagerly await his arrival this Saturday, almost two full weeks after our discovery of the problem, and hope that our furry squatters are not too fecund in the mean time.

While we wait we (well, Girlfriend, primarily) have attempted to drive the creature(s) out by blocking holes and spraying liberally with peppermint oil, including placing mint-soaked cotton balls in strategic corners. The hope, if I understand correctly, is to persuade the mice that our home is the lair of a cotton-pooping peppermint beast.

I worry, though, that we have attracted a singularly worldly mouse, who knows a good thing when he sees it and has no truck with tales of peppermint beasts.

So we lock our food up more securely and wait for Saturday. Our landlord helpfully asked if he could check our mattresses while he's here, because our downstairs neighbors are worried that they have bedbugs.

Bedbugs. Thought we'd dodged a bullet there, for a minute.

We still don't have bedbugs up here, so far as we can tell, but it will be very frustrating if they manage to make their way up here between now and Saturday. Not least because we leave on Sunday to visit my ancestral lands in Massachusetts, and I don't want to bring the little buggers with me.

Perhaps this will all be sorted out with a minimum of further fuss, but I am conserving my optimism for other endeavors.

At the urging of Girlfriend, some friends, my own good sense, and the very universe itself, it seems sometimes, I have agreed to send off my novella "Nenle and Death" to a potential publisher this Friday. The length (almost 15,000 words), rules out many publications, but a few potentials remain. I may even be able to send "The Long Dance" out shortly after that.

This week it looks like I'll have my plate full, of work at least, the most interesting project of which is writing an adventure to be used in playtesting the upcoming D20 RPG Heroes' Tears. The game itself is not unlike 3rd Ed. D&D, but with an approach to classes and levels reminiscent of Shadowrun. I'm pretty excited by the chance to craft adventures for a solid system (and I don't think there's a better chassis available to the public than the SRD) that still has room to grow. (I think I will be making all my own monsters for this one, for example.)

All in all, I should probably get off my blog and get back to work.

* This was me.
** Girlfriend and I were both well reddened over the course of the ceremony and reception, though.

"All that matters now are the people we care about."

I've been coming up with and shooting down ideas for posts all weekend. "Well, I'm not sure I can talk about this without going into detail about my freelance gigs..." "Well, story topic doesn't reflect too well on me..." "Well, this story doesn't reflect too well on this other random person who... well, you never know..."

I've been thinking about Jurassic Park lately. A couple weeks ago Girlfriend grabbed her 2-D glasses (to shield her from 3-D-induced headaches) and we went to see it in 3-D, since that's the way it's in theaters. While it was sort of interesting, I don't think the third dimension added much, except (of course) an excuse for getting it back in theaters. This would be my second time seeing Jurassic Park in theaters, the last time being back in the day, when I was 8.

We rushed out on a Thursday because it was the very last day that our local theater was screening the movie, and we had the unique pleasure of being literally* the only people in the theater. That meant we could actually... well, talk through the whole movie. About the movie, mind you, and it enriched the experience. I'm glad we were able to.

Anyway, I noticed a few things. First of all, I noticed that Jurassic Park really is an excellent movie. It came out 18 years after Jaws and I think Steven Spielberg did much the same thing for another generation here.

Second, the special effects still hold up, 20 years later. In exactly one scene I thought the dinosaurs' skin wasn't as detailed as it would be in a movie made today, and they were occasionally slightly "floaty," but all the other examples of these flaws that I can think of were more egregious and happened in movies years later. If you had told me Jurassic Park was a product of 2008's CGI tech instead of 1993's, I could have believed you.

Last of all, now that I've filled my brain with meta knowledge in the intervening 20 years, I can start thinking about the underlying morality of the movie. I don't mean the message that everyone remembers, and that an entire generation took to heart--that we absolutely should not clone dinosaurs even if we could and even though it would be completely awesome. I mean the more subtle, probably unintentional, morality that a movie ends up displaying when its plot revolves around killing off the cast.

I would dare to say there's always an implicit morality in any story where the cast gets slowly picked off, either entirely or in part. Who lives and who dies? This is how we find the moral lessons of thrillers.

It's worth pointing out that which characters live and die changes dramatically between the original book and the movie adaptation. Presumably that changes the morality quite a bit, but I'm only going to talk about the movie, because I saw it this decade, and I dare say more people saw it than read the book.

Obviously, I'm about to talk about who lives and who dies in this movie, so spoilers ahoy.

At first blush the sorting algorithm of mortality seems congruent with the moral that the more likeable characters keep repeating: respect for nature wins in the end. Genarro, the "bloodsucking lawyer," is the most excited by the chance to exploit the dinosaurs for profit. He is ignobly noshed on by a tyrannosaurus. Nedry disregards the danger of turning off the fences, and even insults one of the dinosaurs' intelligence to its face--a mistake that no one else makes. He is then puked on and eaten.

So far, so good, but then the model breaks down. The next two deaths are Arnold, the non-scuzzy computer guy, and Muldoon, the game warden, and the only person who seems to "get" the velociraptors. If anyone should survive based on the respect-for-nature model, it's him--and incidentally (book spoiler) in the book, he does.

So what gives?

Well, to be fair, Jurassic Park is a popcorn thriller, and not much thought was probably given to the meaning of character mortality beyond what would please the audience, but having realized that and looked into it anyway, I was a little dismayed by what I saw. It's, quite simply what Dr. Sattler says to Hammond while he eats ice cream and muses about his flea circus: "All that matters now are the people we care about."

And that, it would seem, is it. Dr. Sattler's ambiguously romantic life partner survives, as does the charming mathematician who flirted with her, as do Hammond's two grandscamps, who are protected more directly by Dr. Grant's grudging psuedopaternalism (and whose affection in turn saves Hammond).

Who dies, then? Nobody likes Genarro or Nedry. Arnold and Muldoon are likable but professional. Since they're competent and emotionally unattached to anyone else in the movie, they're treated as protectors of the central cast, like the electric fences, and removed to raise the tension in the final act.

So as much as I loved the movie, I was a little saddened that in the end it doesn't seem to matter, really, that people died, since they weren't anyone we cared about.

I guess the only real thing to be done about an observation like that is to do better in the next book, movie, or whatever, that we make.

* Yes, literally. People who know me already know what I mean when I say "literally," but if you're just joining us, I'm unabashedly pedantic about that word. So I mean exactly, actually, and unhyperbolically what I am saying here.

In which I hardly spoil The Hobbit at all

I'm going to have to almost beg some of my friends to read this post, since after my post about The Dark Knight Rises my reputation for spoiling things has approached mythic proportions in certain circles. So here goes: Guys, come oonnn. Every single one of you has read the damn book.

That said, if you haven't read The Hobbit, go do that. Seriously, just go. Don't use the internet until you've finished it. Your life will be better for it. I'll wait.

With that out of the way, The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey was a positive experience on the whole. It also made me sad. Sad because I came away convinced that while Peter Jackson--no, not Peter Jackson, since we can't truly know the minds of the creative people involved*--but some entity or force, either a person or the emanation of commonalities in multiple persons' psyches--we'll call it Fred--brought The Hobbit to the screen as an act of artistic love; and a second entity or force--we'll call it Satan--compelled the story to be stretched into three long movies in a naked grab for money.

This is not actually what I expected. I thought of the Peter Jackson who shopped a two-movie Lord of the Rings for years until Robert Shaye made the brilliant--but then bold--suggestion that the films be a trilogy. When I first read that The Hobbitses would be not two movies but three, the article included some gushing by Mr. Jackson about all the extra material he was excited to be able to fit into the newly trilogized series. I now suspect that Mr. Jackson was compelled by Satan to say this. About 10-20% of the film's run time is padding and cruft that I can't believe anyone was excited to be able to include.

The Hobbit: An Unexpectedly Okay Film is a prolonged battle between Fred and Satan, with both gaining and losing the upper hand at various points. The arc of the movie is a happy one, inasmuch as Satan solidly controls the movie in the beginning but Fred manages to prevail in the end, with only a brief resurgence just before the credits to promise that there will be a sequel.

Fred's influence on the film meant that the worst of my fears were averted. I had worried that there would be no differentiation in tone between The Lord of the Ringses and The Hobbitses. Instead, where Fred had his way, at least, there seemed to be an awareness that LotR belongs to the genre of Epic Fantasy while The Hobbit belongs to the genre of Fantasy Adventure. This is a difference that makes a difference. For example, Tolkien's habit of having his characters spontaneously bust rhymes was suppressed in the LotR movies. In The Hobbit: An Unexpected Musical, not every song that Tolkien wrote shows up (by a long shot) but some of the characters sing, and they do so more spontaneously and with more coordination than anyone in the LotR movies did. There's also a slightly cartoonish veneer over the whole thing, which is not wholly unwelcome... but I'll get to that later, because it is mostly unwelcome.

Martin Freeman is definitely a servant of Fred, and Fred's power is at its apogee when Freeman's Bilbo encounters Andy Serkis' Gollum. In fact, this movie actually excited me about the character of Gollum in a way that the LotR movies didn't. LotR Gollum was innovative and praiseworthy; the Riddle Game would have been a brilliant scene if Andy Serkis had been on screen himself in grey makeup.**

Satan's influence on the film meant that I was disappointed in unexpected ways. Perhaps the most pervasive effect of Satan's influence was--believe it or not--the CGI. Basically all the goblins, trolls, wargs, eagles, staircases, hedgehogs, and bunny rabbits are fairly obviously digitized illusions. It seemed pretty blatant that after demanding eight hours of movie, Satan was not willing to shell out for bigatures, props, and makeup on the scale of LotR. (After all, we were all going to see the movie anyway, and aren't computers 10 years better than they were 10 years ago? That has to be enough.) As a result, the movie mostly works, but it never inspires the awe that its predecessors did because it is mostly fake. See the aforementioned cartoonish veneer.

The inserted character Azog, who is apparently set to be the series' visible Big Bad (allowing for Smaug to be handled more intelligently, like Jaws), is particularly unconvincing, which is a particular shame. He also feels thoroughly obligatory and joyless... and pretty detachable. He may not be as much an attempt to pad out the movie as to create a throughline in an otherwise episodic story, but the attempt is misguided. If I were a betting man I would bet that his prominence was ramped up in post-production to fill the void left by the Necromancer, who presumably was going to be the villain of the first half of The Hobbit but will now be contained instead in the second third.

The writing is uneven, in places as insubstantial as the CGI, but I expected weakness there. I am really surprised to have been so visually disappointed by The Hobbit's superfluities. It is true that a lot of the superfluity is super-superfluous. Elijah Wood, in particular, seemed to have just wandered onto set on his way to pick up his check. There are several characters who we are apparently just supposed to be happy to see, and we don't do much more than see them.

I am more optimistic about the second movie than I might be. It will probably consist mostly of fanfic about the White Council and the Necromancer, but I will give that a go if Necky is a more compelling villain than Azog.

It's actually a little frightening how effective TH:tUJ's artistic triage was. Fred and Satan both knew what notes would have to play true in order for fans to come back for part 2/3. What absolutely had to work really worked, but there was lot of slack in between.

Finally, a lot of fuss has been made about the framerate. I can't speak to it. What I saw was obviously old-fashioned 24 FPS, and if anything, it actually ended up blurrier than other movies I've seen. So if you can, I guess, try the 48 FPS, maybe. I don't know. All the reviews I read complained about it. It's probably the future, though, so get used to it, I guess.

* And certain people insist that copies of The Silmarillion burn when Peter Jackson touches them, and he wants to cancel Christmas to make more room in the year for warg attacks.
** Not to minimize the contributions of the digital puppeteers who created the physical performance. It's beyond me to say where Serkis' decisions end and the animators' decisions begin.

A pumpkin again this time

Another Halloween, another hollow fruit. I considered a watermelon this year, but they aren't in season. I also considered a few different kinds of squash out of apparent necessity, seeing only small and moldy pumpkins at the Home Depot where we happened to be looking for pumpkins and storm supplies.* We decided to have a go at another store, though, and they had plenty of pumpkins, so we bought one.

I've tried to be arch or clever with my Jack-o-lantern designs for the past few years, maybe because I had housemates to impress. This year I tried a design or two that amused me but I settled on something more sincerely creepy. Maybe because I've been reading so much Lovecraft. But this is what I came up with:

Not bad, I think. Thought you might like to see.

Sweet dreams.

* We're fine, by the way. The power stayed on, obviously, since it's still on and now I'm posting to my blog. There's a swampy patch in the basement, but we've had worse.

"Old Bugs," and how to make a point badly

One thing I will say about Lovecraft,* he is good enough that his misses are educational. I keep coming back to a story I didn't like very much, as a good example of a sort of literature I don't like very much, that being the fictional polemic.

"Old Bugs" is a deviation from form for Lovecraft, being a fictional harangue about the evils of alcohol. Not being particularly interested in the American interbellum period, myself, I tend to forget about the temperance movement, Prohibition, and so on. So it came as a surprise, but shouldn't have, that H.P. Lovecraft, in addition to his other uptightnesses, was a teetotaler.

The story, written in 1919, takes place in the distant future of 1950, where alcohol is illegal and only available at the seediest of speakeasies alongside hashish and opium. The title character** is a thoroughly wretched drunk who is far fallen from prior respectability. The story is contorted a bit to give the impression of a major reveal, but the upshot is that in spite of being a lifelong thrall to the demon drink, Bugs heroically prevents [spoiler] from starting down the same dark path.

It's worth pointing out that, according to Wikipedia, An H. P. Lovecraft Encyclopedia (by S. T. Joshi and David E. Schultz) calls "Old Bugs" "a little masterpiece of comic deflation and self-parody."*** It may well be, although the humor went by me, and I think the sin Lovecraft commits is basically the same either way.

It's not the argument itself I want to talk about, although it intrigues me a bit to see how Lovecraft portrays drinkers as wretchedly addicted, to a man. Was the concept of alcoholism as something that some people are prone to and others aren't in circulation in the 19-teens, I wonder? Even uninterested as I am in recreational drugs, some of the imagery (men licking spilled whiskey off the floor in a bar where they're presumably already being served) makes me wonder if the excesses of D.A.R.E.'s rhetoric existed through the ages with its target changing with the circumstances.

I enjoy and appreciate arguing and making points. I don't like seeing polemical points made overtly through fiction.

Now, I was going to go off about my frustration with the practice--but then I remembered that tales as venerable as "Little Red Riding Hood," wouldn't I? What am I saying if I condemn "Old Bugs" for making a point through fiction but let stand stories that are genuinely persuasive or thought provoking.

There are two points I won't settle for from myself:
1. It's wrong to do it badly, but it's okay to do it well.
2. It's okay as long as you're making a point I like.

My conclusion is that fiction is useful for demonstrating "truths," but not for demonstrating "facts." If an author says "what if such-and-such?" and proceeds honestly from there, the reader will usually follow. True, the author may only have presented an intriguing thought experiment in this case, but that is the limitation of not using facts. If an author simply says "this is so" in the context of fiction, there is no argument. The author is simply saying "because I said so" and there is a very narrow range of subjects on which I will take a fiction author's word. It's a good habit not to trust a nonfiction author either if you can manage it.

* There are actually many things I will say about Lovecraft, but today I will say this.
** One also forgets that "Bugs" was once a "name."
*** It's also worth granting that this story was not published until after Lovecraft's death, so we shouldn't judge him too harshly by it. I hold it to be unfair to judge an artist by what they choose not to release to the public.

Arguing with fortune cookies

My first day back from vacation nobody, understandably, wanted to cook. Consequently I'm still working through fortune cookies, and I have to say that this last batch has been a bit odd. The old tricks don't work so well. (You know the ones I mean; "Do not hesitate to look for help, an extra hand should always be welcomed... in bed.")*

That's the sort of thing you expect. Of course there was the one time my grandma got "Pass the check to the person on your left," but that would make less sense if it came with take-out. But the one I got the other day, and really wish I could find now, said, "Evil as a force cannot exist to the healthy mind."

Does that mean to you what it means to me? Because my reading of that is that only crazy people could believe in the Devil. I think my cookie was trying to pick a theological fight with me.

I don't even believe in evil as a personal force, but I know people who I think do. It's not a conversation I've had recently. It's not that I'm personally insulted, but... pretty cheeky for a cookie, don't you think?

The next day I had a fortune cookie with (or maybe for) breakfast, which said, "Today is probably a huge improvement over yesterday."

Why, yes, cookie, at least so far... in the realm of cookie fortunes.

* Before you judge me, I swear that that, minus the coda, was the first fortune I saw on fortunecookiemessage.com when I went looking for a "normal" fortune.

Fishing for controversy - Spoilers and scholars

Eminent scholar and literary critic Stanley Fish said something dumb on Monday, and the great thing about eminent scholars and literary critics is what good exercise disagreeing with them can be. In this case, Dr. Fish mounted a defense of his column from two weeks ago, in which he gave away a plot point of the Hunger Games trilogy.* In response to a flurry of frustrated comments, he made the following claims:

1. We actually enjoy stories more after they’ve been spoiled.

2. The only books that can truly be “spoiled” are ones whose only value is suspense, i.e. inferior ones.

Tacit corollary: If you have a problem with knowing the ending of a book in advance, you’re either reading the wrong books or you’re reading the books wrong.

If you know me you might be surprised that I’m staking out my opposition to spoilers. Wasn’t it I who casually read about the ending of The Usual Suspects** mere days before the culmination of my friend’s years-long quest to find a copy to show to me? Did I not come to fantasy by paging through a companion encyclopedia to The Lord of the Rings, pausing with particular enjoyment at the entry for Gollum, which described his character arc in full? Well, yes. But we shouldn't always do unto others as we do unto ourselves.

Fish argues that the pleasure of rereading is greater than the pleasure of reading something the first time. I don’t disagree with this point. Many times has it been said that the difference between serious readers and the rest of humanity is that serious readers will read the same book more than once. I may not, as Girlfriend does, reread The Lord of the Rings ever year, but I know the pleasure of coming back to something and reading it more deeply, with more knowledge.*** If nothing else, we get better at understanding a story with each pass. But because one pleasure is greater is no reason not to have both, says I.

Fish even brings Science! to bear in defense of his first point, which in a literary argument is a little like bringing a shotgun gun to a knife fight. But, like a consummate knife-fighter holding a shotgun, he’s more assailable here than he ought to be. One preexisting opinion and one study do not combine to form a fact, or even a consensus, and it’s beyond ambition to suppose that modern psychology is able to comparatively measure two disparate kinds of enjoyment.

Are they disparate? Fish admits as much, but he dismisses the entire value of a spoiler-free read as “suspense,” and he argues that suspense can be recaptured on subsequent readings. What he is describing, though, is one form of tension, and not the whole pleasure of experiencing a story for the first time.

With foreknowledge, we can enjoy dramatic irony in knowing from the beginning, say, that our hero is really a tomato. We appreciate the double-meanings and ambiguities that allow this fact to exist in the story alongside an impression that the hero is a human being. We may even wish, caught up in the emotional tide of the story, that it were not so that the hero was a tomato. But having been told in advance, perhaps by an eminent scholar and literary critic, that the hero is a tomato, we will never—not once—wonder as the tension mounts if the hero is really a pineapple, or an automobile. We cannot have uncertainty.

I was only recently introduced as an adult to serious mystery writing—Dorothy Sayers’ novels—and I found that a great deal of the pleasure came from trying to outguess the novel. Often I was wrong, or only partly right (never completely right), but the novels were rich with possibilities in that first reading. For a moment, everyone could be the killer, in every possible way, and not in a winking “or so it seems but we know better” sense.

Having had and enjoyed that experience, I can go back and read the books again. Knowing the truth of the story I can enjoy hints and ironies and depths that I hadn’t seen before, and that is in no way diminished by my having read the book once before in ignorance.

There's been argument about the authority of the author and the reader's freedom to interpret, but nowhere do those two factors coexist in such perfection as before the story is finished. The million possibilities the reader brings, and the winnowing of those possibilities by the author into the complete text, are a part of any story. For Fish, though, it seems the story might as well be over before it's begun.

You can’t write an academic paper about how you had the wrong idea about what was going on in a book, at least not if you hope to be an eminent scholar and literary critic. However I would feel sorry for anyone who had become so good at rereading that they had forgotten how to read a book for the first time. I would resent someone who casually damaged someone else’s ability to enjoy what they no longer could. I would lose respect for anyone who purported to be a scholar of reading and displayed such ignorance of—or contempt for—the way most people experience most stories.

It’s been observed that writing is like sex: first you do it by yourself, then you do it with a few close friends, and finally you do it for money. I would say that reading is as well: the first time you do it wrong, then you get better with experience, but it would be sad to skip the first time.

* Full disclosure: I have not read the article in which he does this, because I have not read The Hunger Games, and, as you will see, I take the issue of spoilers more seriously than Fish does.

** On a forum thread called “The Ultimate Spoiler Thread,” where each new post spoiled a different book or movie.

*** Tangent: Watch Arrested Development twice. It’s ridiculous.

Bat-servations

This started as a reply to a comment on my last post, but it just kept getting longer in the conception.

Having seen The Avengers, I saw the latest trailer for The Dark Knight Rises as well. So, let's talk about that.

Okay. Batman Begins was surprisingly good. The Dark Knight was surprisingly better. If The Dark Knight Rises is as much better than The Dark Knight as The Dark Knight was than Batman Begins, Christopher Nolan may actually become a god.

Do I give TDK too much credit? I really don't think I do. Begins may have been the best Batman movie to date, when it came out, but TDK actually transcended. It gave people new ways to see the world, which I think is a big part of what art is for. The Joker's makeup and Glasgow smile became new shorthand for a modern kind of evil.*

All that to say that I am braced for disappointment by TDKR, because there's a lot more room to go down than up. It may do me good to lower my expectations, anyway.

But what about the trailer? Well, the hopes and fears it provokes in me can be sorted by character.

Batman: I think I've guessed how this movie will go down, but I hope to be surprised along the way. For now, I'm glad that the movie's marketing has gotten ahead of the "Batman dies" thing. That is, a lot of people are thinking it. If we did die in this movie, it would be an easy mistake to underestimate fans' intelligence and studiously avoid mentioning the possibility, so that it would come as a "surprise." Instead, the trailer is full of "maybe."

Bane: It's hard to tell where they're taking this guy. He's got some sort of xenomorph thing going on with his face. When they put a bag on Cillian Murphy's head and called him "Scarecrow," it made sense to me, but whatever they've put on Tom Hardy's face is harder to believe than the leather fetish/luchador mask in the comics. He's clearly got it in for Batman personally, and that's about all I can tell.

Catwoman: I've always worried about what they would do with her, because she's an easy character to make ridiculous. The workplace romance she has going with Batman will be a hard sell after what happened in TDK. Most of all I'm just afraid that she'll fall victim to what I call Julia Roberts syndrome: the belief that when the camera is pointed at an attractive woman, nothing interesting can go on for fear of distracting the audience. On the other hand, in what little we see of her in the trailer, I'm almost worried that she'll be--dare I say?--under-sexualized, a failing I had not thought Catwoman even eligible for. In what is surely, granted, an emotionally climactic scene, she seems so darn sincere. This from a character whose persona normally says, "Come play with fire." 

John Blake: Who the hell is Joseph Gordon-Levitt playing? I'm as glad to see him in this movie as the next guy, but what is he doing? If nothing else, he's promising that the movie will have more plot than I can extrapolate from a teaser trailer and Wikipedia.

* To be clear, I think photoshopping it onto a politician's face is a vicious and puerile way to make a point. If we must be so crass, though, the toothbrush mustache was overdue for retirement. The point is that it speaks to the penetration of the image.

The selves we choose, and the selves we create, Part 2

Part 1 is here.

I've thought recently about just how many characters I've invented--not as a writer but as a player of video games and role-playing games. It is more than many but fewer than some. That's the point I was getting at in my last post: that the act of choosing and creating characters is becoming a common and frequent cultural experience. It means something to make these choices. At the very least it reflects something in us.

Video games are becoming a major way that people interact with stories. It's worth noticing, then, that it's often the role of the player, not the designer, to create the protagonist. Halo and its iconic Master Chief rose and fell in the last decade. The hero of the games we play today is mutable.

Granted, this trend is largely the work of a few studios, but Bioware, Bethesda, and the caretakers of MMORPGs are doing a lot more than their share of the storytelling.

Truly granular character creation has become a hallmark of western RPGs. These are really the video game equivalent of the bildungsroman, with the player's hand on every brick as it comes down. The whole game might be a character creation mode: the first hour or so is spent defining the character in broad strokes such as sex, name, appearance, and aptitudes; the next 20 to 100 hours are spent deciding how the character reacts to various scenarios.*

I confess that, from everything I've heard, I could speak more authoritatively on this subject if I had played the Mass Effect games. There, I am told, is a rich narrative that changes profoundly based on the choices you make about and with your character, not just a world you move through in a set direction making cosmetic choices as you go. When I have $100 and 100 hours to spare I will look into this further.

I actually came to truly intensive character creation through wrestling games. (There was a run of very good wrestling video games in the late 90s that you didn't need to care for actual professional wrestling to enjoy.) I could spend hours on that, building a ridiculous costume piece by piece, and choosing exactly what kind of punch my character threw when I pushed the button this way or that way. The legitimately boggling slider festival that opens Skyrim is comparatively manageable.

But one of these is more like sculpture and the other is more like writing. Role-playing video games adapted the free-form character crafting of their tabletop forebears and combined it with the cosmetic characterization element. The upshot was that you could make yourself a character in the story, either in the sense of making one for yourself or making one out of yourself. With an amount of obsessive application that's hardly even abnormal in this day and age, one could create a Tussaud-quality likeness for their in-game avatar. And of course these are almost all fantasy role-playing games, meaning you choose an "class" for your character such as a wizard, a warrior, or a thief.

So here there is no stable of characters to choose among, but a whole spectrum of possibility. What do we choose? I almost always used myself as a model. My own given name--not Cory, the other one--was suitably exotic to suit a fantasy protagonist.

So when I discovered the D&D-inspired Baldur's Gate 2 my first character was a sorcerer named Corodon, Neutral Good by alignment and apt to talk his way out of danger when he could. He was an elf, and his skin was blue (not drow indigo, but more cyan) so he was suitably bizarre, but otherwise he was who I wanted to be in the game. With class a variable, and skin color brought back within the bounds of normalcy and self-identification, this continued to be my first character in games I've played of the same sort until today, more or less.

Oddly, I didn't follow the selection heuristic I mentioned in my last post. My characters tended to be idealized versions of myself. After the blue skin experiment, I didn't take the opportunity again to make a character alien or monstrous, even when the Elder Scrolls games made it a viable option.

The penchant for charismatic characters comes partly from the sort of morals I wanted to play and partly from the practicalities of the games themselves. Bioware in particular filled its games with lavish dialogue trees, so that talking your way out of (or into) a situation was always at least interesting. I wanted to be able to talk my way through trouble because I wanted to see how the game would handle it--the story that got told that way was more interesting to me than the one where every problem got solved through fights.

The idealized self was my go-to through about halfway through Dragon Age, two years ago. That's when I looked at my digital "self" and found myself profoundly bored with him. Instead of stepping into the character's place in the world, I was out here, looking at a character who, because he had no real differences from me, was a blank. I, the audience, liked or disliked characters, and approved or disapproved of developments, but my protagonist didn't: he was a vessel, not a character. Also his face, which was sort of like mine but not quite, got very hard to look at after a while.

Such is the danger of this type of association. It also runs up against the frustrations of finite character choices. This turned me off Mass Effect very early on. My protagonist was me, according to me, but I often had to make decisions where what I would have done wasn't an option. This made the story that the game was willing to tell more galling than engrossing.

My friend Bryan found a solution of sorts. In Mass Effect he modeled his character not on himself, but on Edward James Olmos, best known to us as William Adama in Battlestar Galactica. The likeness was only approximate, but what he found was a face with character--and not his own. So when the character followed Bryan's instructions in a way he didn't expect, the result was a surprising development that revealed something of the character's character, not a failure of the interface.

Naturally I stole the idea. I confess that it has done less for my experience of Skyrim than I had hoped. But then as a writer I have always been greedy for dictatorial, rather than merely interpretive, control over stories I participate in.

I never get the same sense of flamboyant self-expression from most RPGs that ask me to build a character as opposed to the ones that ask me to choose one.

The most freedom I can remember in character creation was in a plucky Telnet game called RetroMUD. Being entirely text-based, a player described their character's appearance in words, meaning practically anything was possible. The game also offered a truly preposterous array of races (including dragons, titans, atomies, robots, and squid) and more character classes than it's really safe to think about. Just writing about RetroMUD actually makes me want to play it again, not because it was good as a game or I was any good at it, but because it is a world where you can really be someone, and that someone is almost anyone.

But really, RetroMUD is so much text-based that playing it is almost like writing. It teeters on the far edge of the continuum between Reading and Writing, where the big guns of gaming stay, ultimately, tethered to the Reading end by the authorship of the designer.

* I say "deciding" somewhat pointedly. Rare (in my experience) is the game where doing the "right" thing is really more difficult than the alternative. Bioshock came close with the choice of saving or harvesting the little sisters, but couldn't resist compensating you more or less in-kind for the resources you gave up by sparing them. But fictional interactive ethics aren't quite a topic for today.

Another scary pineapple story

The judo club is ramping up for belt testing in a week, and I decided to go up for promotion. The sudden change in the tenor of practice ("I know this is what works, but this is what they'll look for on the test.") put me in a foul mood about standardized testing, generally. Hence, I was poised to be outraged by the news coming out of New York about their 8th-grade English test. As it turns out, its complicated. Complicated and frustrating.

The other day there was a flap in New York about a bizarre reading followed by some vague questions on the state standardized English test. The reading was a sort of postmodern fable about a race between a pineapple and a hare. While the hare won the race, most of the spectator animals assumed that the pineapple had something up its sleeve. The moral of the story: "Pineapples don't have sleeves." The passage is attributed to Daniel Pinkwater, though it hardly resembles what he turns out to have actually written.* For one thing, his story was about a rabbit and an eggplant.

Here's the story at the New York Daily News. It's worth pointing out that that is not where I read about it first. I saw this first on Gawker, where writer Max Read seems to have made some judicious edits to the reading and questions to make everything even less explicable. At any rate, the quoted material in the two articles doesn't match up. More on that later.

First of all, I find the story itself amusing. I "get" it. I'm not upset that something silly, or even a bit nonsensical, made it onto the standardized test. The questions are the problem.

About those questions. They're different, depending on where you read about it. According to the people begging Mr. Pinkwater for guidance,** the questionable questions are "Which animal was the wisest?" and "Why did the animals eat the pineapple?" Now, even for a perfectly logical reading, these are subjective judgments that aren't suited for multiple choice questions. Asked of a nonsense story, they are a bad joke. On a standardized test, on which hangs children's futures and teachers' careers, they are an affront. But.

But, those aren't the questions as reported by the New York Daily News. They quote the questions as (emphasis mine) "Which animal spoke the wisest words?" and "The animals ate the pineapple most likely because they were..." These aren't great questions, but they're better. They should be cause for indignation, but as standardized English tests go they are apparently par for the course.

Now I read the question has been discounted from students' grades. Oh, and if you were wondering, the animals ate the pineapple most likely because they were annoyed. Now, assuming that the questions are as the News related them, and not as Gawker did (and I hope I can trust a newspaper in this matter), if this brings shame on the testing regime the irony will be that there was nothing especially bad about the questions. It just took a truly absurd story to make people notice.

New York paid Pearson VUE $32 million dollars for this test, and forgive me if I get the impression that Pearson didn't try very hard.

The saddest thing, to me, was the News's quote from Tyree Furman, one of the kids taking the test. "I thought it was a little strange, but I just answered it as best as I could. You just have to give it your best answer. These are important tests."

* There's no permalink to the post in question, as far as I can tell. If it's not on the first page by the time you read this, go to April 17, 2012. Or just buy his novel, Borgel. Having read it, you'll know more about this mess than I do.

** They more or less match the questions on Gawker, but the versions there are even more vague, and because of a change to the reading, the right answer to one is almost certainly different. Apparently this reading has shown up on tests in other states before; maybe this is an older version. The worse, then, for those other states.

Holiday crafts, oviparous rabbit edition

Happy Easter, everyone! I think for most of my readers it actually is Easter as I post this. For the rest of you, wait for it...

There. It's been a crafty couple of weeks. First, congratulations are due to certain friends who made a daughter this week. Certainly it is more of an accomplishment than anything I had a hand in creating this week, but that's for them to brag and post pictures about on their own.

Girlfriend and I collaborated on a stuffed owl to bestow upon the child, and got it to the parents just ahead of the baby's arrival. Here's a picture of it (the owl, not the baby) and of the person who did all of the work:

I love how surprised it looks in this picture.

But today being the day before Easter, it was time to dye eggs. I don't remember when exactly we decided to make this a "thing,"  but now it's a "thing" and we do it, rather experimentally sometimes.

 Ready for serious art.

Last year, and I think the year before as well, we used food coloring for dye and were able to use the droppers and concentrated dyes to make some Jackson-Pollack-esque patterns. This year we used the dissolving pellets instead, so we couldn't do that, but we did some things I think are neat anyway.

Two things here. First, on the left, yes, I'm continuing my theme of incongruous jack-o'-lanterns*. You don't have to think that's the cleverest thing ever. As for the one on the right, I'm pleased with it largely because it represents a way to use eggs that get botched. I spent a good long time getting an egg an even shade of red, and then managed to break it. I might have thrown it out, but now my otherwise relatively unadorned "eye egg" is wearing it! In this picture the shell is just wrapped around the egg, but I went back and stuck it on with egg white so that it will survive transport.

Nothing too original** here. I am kind of pleased with my bucolic egg on the left. On the right, another egg salvaged using the remains of a less lucky one.

 If this were local news I'd say something about "sunny side up" here and my co-host would laugh.

This was the first egg where we discovered something that's maybe obvious to everyone else, but Girlfriend and I discovered at age 27. You know those clear crayons that come with the dye? Well obviously you can use them to keep part of an egg white--I knew that already--but you can also use it on top of one layer of dye to preserve it through a second layer of dye. This is a trick we'll tuck away for the future, like the shell-wrapping thing. If we keep doing this this way every year, we are going to end up a couple of old people who are awesome at Easter eggs. That is not something I saw for myself, but I'll take it.

Okay. Because we're crazy, were going to drive to Philadelphia now. Bye.

* I went back to look up my "pineappolantern" post, to make sure I spelled "jack-o'-lantern" consistently. I thought it might be easier to just search for "pineappolantern" on Google than to go through the blog archives. You know what's humbling? Finding out you don't come up on the first page of search results for a word you invented.

** First, I wrote "origingal." In a better world, that would mean something.

Forest vs. trees

I had a fun St. Patrick's Day, and woke up not with a hangover, but a fever and a sore throat. Life goes on.

It's been something of an odd transition, working near full-time freelance hours. I've had some realizations that were interesting (to me, anyway).

The first of those is that freelance proofreading, if I can fit it around writing, might be a good thing to keep a hand in even while writing "full-time." It keeps one broadly- (as opposed to merely well-) read, and exposes one to the thoughts of people one would not otherwise meet. A writer needs to maintain human contact, and at least a semblance of varied activity, or else his (or her) stories will inexorably gravitate toward the anti-story: the protagonist, an old writer, living alone, runs out of ideas. (We might perhaps call this genre "anti-fiction," as, while it is not true, it is also paradoxically devoid of imagination or embellishment of reality.)*

Trying to work a real full day on my laptop, I finally got sick of screens. Because my work right now has to be done on my computer, if I want a respite it means doing my creative writing by hand.

Writing longhand is such a different experience. It's easy to forget this, but the writing process actually changes. At least for me. I can't write as fast as I can think. I can't type as fast as I can think either, but I think in fits and starts. When I type the pauses in my thinking are periods of silence and a stationary, blinking cursor. Writing by hand I can do my thinking while I wait for my hand to catch up with my head. There's time to revise while the hand is moving; draft 1.0 is really draft 1.5.

The extra time allows for sprawling, luxuriant sentences of the sort that were more common when everyone wrote like this. Heck, if I had to stop to sharpen my quill after every line, maybe I could make everything rhyme. To a certain extent, the extra time has to be spent embellishing the sentence at hand. You can't just buffer in a chapter of prose over an hour of diligent longhand.

Another thing happened with which I am pleased. I had come to a snag in Nenle (this is not what I was pleased with--the snag, I mean) and decided it might be worthwhile to summarize the whole story in one sitting in longhand. The point of this being that if I would need to keep to the essentials to fit it into one sitting, and if I got bored while writing any part of the summary it would stand to reason that that part would be even more boring fleshed out.

This proved very helpful. I had been getting bogged down, not really able to see more than a scene ahead or behind, wherever I was. The story was meandering and I was beginning to wonder if all of it had a point. This time I was able to answer all the "what happens nexts" while I still remembered what happened at the beginning, and the story that emerged turned coherent again.

I did this with Hengist a while back too, plotting out some emotional arcs that I thought had been lost in the noise of individual scenes. It strikes me as somewhat ironic that I can't do this until I've generated a lot of noise. If I just set out to concisely trace a story arc, I doubt it would be more than occasionally interesting. The story has to emerge from the noise, grow wild (hey, new metaphor), and then be tamed again (and another. Congratulations, you've mixed a metaphor from mineral, vegetable, and animal components--go to bed, Cory).

Good has come of it. I should probably make a point of doing it in the process of everything I write. It is so easy to get lost, or to labor over a sentence through a jeweler's loupe, putting the perfect polish on an idea that's just wrong.

* Yes, that is harsh to the point of pretentiousness. I should talk. Just because my ratio of artistic integrity to published work is a value of infinity doesn't mean the numerator is nontrivial.

You are what you eat, part 2

I sometimes (periodically, perhaps) forget just how much what I read affects how I write. The problem is that I hate to be exacting about what I read based on how I'm writing. Lately I've been stalling out in my writing time, doing a lot of world-building and a bit of poetry when plot and prose felt like tar pits. A little of it is having come to a tricky point in Nenle, but this would be less of a problem if I felt agile when I came to it.

Last night I realized that I've been reading more verse than usual,which might explain why my prose seemed to dry up and I was starting to get drips of poetry. I put The Fairy Queen aside at the end of Book 1, because it was moving just too slowly for me. I made use of my Kindle and picked up Pope's Iliad (after, you may recall, putting down his Odyssey). That has been more agreeable. For one thing--and it feels like the sort of thing that shouldn't matter, but does--the lines are arranged in the free Kindle edition like blocks of prose. The rhythm and rhymes are still clear, but the momentum keeps up better.* Which is to say, I'm actually enjoying The Iliad, which makes it more frustrating that I apparently need to read something else.

But I do. I wish I had a better grasp of my intellectual nutrition. The Iliad lacks something that I need, but to extend the metaphor, it's not hamburger. Or, at least, not cheap hamburger.** Perhaps it is more like spinach, if I liked spinach. Broccoli?

The problem ("the" problem) is that, unlike food, I tend to read one thing until I'm done, if I can help it. I'm a fifth of the way through The Iliad and if I had my druthers that means I would keep reading it until it was done. But the month or more that would probably take me is too long to be banging my head against my writing. I need propellant. Or, to return to the food metaphor, six weeks of broccoli would be very bad for me, not least if I followed it with a month of potatoes and a (moderate) three weeks of beef.

But that's the way I read. For one thing I don't read exceedingly quickly, and for another I have safeguards in place to keep me from sinking an entire day into reading if I have anything else to do. I don't think I can read more than one narrative at a time and keep them all in my head, either; I certainly don't think I could keep the Greeks and Trojans straight during a detour through, say, Anathem.*** Last night I picked up The Lord of the Rings again, and I feel more limber already for being half a dozen pages into Chapter 1, but while I read that I'm not reading anything new.

It's a dilemma, and a frustrating one. If it were only a matter of reading what I liked it would sort itself out relatively quickly. Where I run into trouble is the things I like that don't feed my writing.

I wish the next issue of Fantasy & Science Fiction would come. That's good fuel, but it only comes every other month.

When I started this post I expected to segue into another topic by the end, but now I can't remember what it was. That may just mean there will be another post close on the heels of this one.

* It would be interesting if this were toggleable in long verse narratives. We surely have the technology, and maybe someone has already done this without my notice.
** I had a surprisingly good hamburger last night at a bar called The Heights.
*** Another thing I got for the Kindle, since the hardcover edition of Anathem weighs 80 pounds and only fits through doors standing up.

Adventures in Baltimore

Presidents' Day weekend was a nice one. Girlfriend and I went to Baltimore, about as spontaneously as we do anything. That is, we wanted to do it. On Friday I did some research on what you can actually do in Baltimore. (The case for the city up to that point had rested mainly on proximity.) On Saturday we started actually planning it, looking at train tickets for Sunday morning and Monday evening, and reasonable hotels for in between. So as it had turned out, there are several good museums in Baltimore as well as an aquarium, but their hours, combined with the hours Girlfriend needed to be back in DC to get work done, were generating headaches. We'd be rushing to get there when there wouldn't be much to do, then rushing back to get back to work. I was beginning to wonder if we actually had time for a vacation, and was getting ready to call the whole thing off, when Girlfriend asked me, "What if we go tonight?"

It was 3 p.m. at this point and I had already made a hotel reservation for Sunday night. The deadline for cancelling that reservation was 4 p.m. the day before, or one hour from then. But over the next hour she convinced me she had the right idea. We canceled the reservation with five minutes to spare. We booked a different room at a different hotel and bought train tickets for 7 o'clock. Then we ran around the house throwing things into bags, swung by the pharmacy to pick up a prescription I had to have refilled that day, ate dinner at the mall food court, and were off.

I forgot to account for the track work on the Metro. We had a long wait for the red line to get us to Union Station. But, there we got, timed so perfectly that you would have thought I knew what I was doing.

So, there's a Quality Inn in Baltimore that's surprisingly nice. Actually, possibly the nicest hotel I have any memory of staying in. (I think the place in Westport was, on the whole, a better experience, but that was a family operation. Also, we got trapped in the parking lot by an elk.) Booking the room at the last minute apparently brought it back into our price range, so hooray for that!

Girlfriend particularly liked the window hangings.

She made a nest there and hibernated until Monday.

As you can see, Girlfriend remembered to bring her camera, which means I get to put pictures in this post.

We walked out that night to get drinks and some food. We had a frustrating time at the bar we finally settled on. It's partially, but not entirely, their fault. For example, it was unfortunate that they were out of Blue Moon. It was my fault that, when browsing their remaining beer selection more or less at random, I forgot what's special about O'Doul's. Similarly, it was not their fault that my girlfriend is passionately averse to the substance known as "nacho cheese," but it is their fault that their menu specified mozzarella. (It was special. Or supposed to be.) And ultimately it is on me that I didn't send either of these things back.

Downtown Baltimore looks pretty nice. On the walk back we saw the back of the Baltimore Basilica.

We intended to circle around to the front at some point, but didn't get around to it. We also saw the Washington Monument (not that one) and got a shot of that in daylight.

Commemorating George Washington's imprisonment atop the tower of Orthanc.

We found The Walter's Art Museum, and that's a pretty cool (free) place. We got to the bulk of it in our two hours or so there, but could have spent two, or six, more. I'll share one bronze thingy that caught my eye:

It was maybe one or two feet tall. That's the Fall of Adam and Eve, there, but what got my attention was the monkey munching away in the background. Conjures up some fun thoughts. Of course Darwin wouldn't come along for another two centuries or so, and inasmuch as this prefigures him it's a coincidence. The monkey, according to the museum card, symbolizes lust and foolishness or some such. But I like to imagine him a step behind Adam and Eve, waiting for his turn.

The chunk of the museum I found most interesting was an eclectic collection organized as the sort of things an Enlightenment-era nobleman might accumulate. An 11-inch Egyptian "mummy" filled with corn sat on a shelf under a Mesoamerican stone "idol," with cards explaining not only what they were, but what the people collecting them in the 1600s thought they were. A narwhal horn hung, contextless, on the wall. At least, I couldn't find an explanation. It looked about 10 feet long--much too big to have been passed off as something that grew out of a horse's forehead, as I understand they had been.

We went down from there to the Inner Harbor to check out the National Aquarium with some of Girlfriend's relatives. The aquarium's exhibits were interesting, but the layout made for a tightly-controlled experience. I felt like I was on an assembly line. It was dark, and hard to get good pictures.

Guess.*

But there were some successes.

There's a rainforest exhibit too. I found out what a Screaming Piha sounds like. That's something that stops being fun right away.

All in all, a good trip, a good break. I discover, over and over, how nice it is to just up and go somewhere with Girlfriend. We might go back to Baltimore some time. Then again, we might pick a completely different destination at random.

* It's the whale skeleton hanging from the ceiling.

How about that weather?

It's strange what specific memories can be called up by an exact feeling you'd forgotten ever having before. I'm going about my business when a place or a desire comes into my memory, apropos of nothing. I walked to the mall today to get myself out of the house, get some things, and treat myself to some food-court teriyaki.* (Sarku, incidentally, became a favorite commissary of mine back when I worked at the Northgate Mall. I definitely never expected one to turn up in Maryland, any more than I would expect to see a Taco Del Mar in Florida.** It feels like the Seattle embassy in Hyattsville.) Wow, I lost my train of thought. So, I was coming back from the mall, and as I was coming in the door I had the sudden urge to play a rented copy of Earthbound.

I rented Earthbound several weekends in, I think, the late summer and/or early school year of 1995. It's one of the games I just loved, and if it hadn't been for the hype around the Nintendo 64 I probably would have asked for it for that Christmas.***

I don't know exactly what brought this up. There are two sets of stairs between the street and my front door, now, just like there were then. Coming inside I felt a very particular change in temperature and odor. A specific, faintly musty smell on cool air always makes me nostalgic for my parents' basement, and that was some of it.

You might have noticed that the weather outside elicited my sense memory of a summer day on Long Island. I'm not a fan of the weather in Maryland right now. Today would have been a very pleasant day in late May, or a welcome reprieve in July, but on February 1 of a winter that's had approximately one inch of snow, I kind of resent it. Not least on Girlfriend's behalf--shouldn't she get a snow day or two. I don't think getting your third day of school off for earthquake repairs really compensates.

Until next time.

* Firefox's spell-check doesn't seem to recognize "teriyaki," but it suggests I change it to "sukiyaki." What an odd lexical phenomenon.
** There are those, too. Seattle's not that special, apparently.
*** I did get it for Christmas eventually, with Chrono Trigger. A very good year in that regard. This was back when there was a place called Funcoland, and before I realized that the price of a video game can go up as it gets older, otherwise I would have produced a more merciful Christmas list.

Sequel Syndrome

I'm admittedly late to the game with this, but there's something baffling to me about movie sequels. I just watched Ip Man 2 and, while I don't want to run that movie down too much, it got me thinking about this again.

I call it a syndrome, first, because "sequelitis" is taken. TV Tropes offers a wide but not comprehensive list of symptoms and occurrences. Second, I call it a syndrome because I, at least, can't pin down a single cause. (Perhaps, like many modern diseases, the underlying pathogen is confirmation bias.) Sometimes a sequel's just worse. Sometimes there's someone or something you can blame, but not always.

So, I liked Ip Man a lot. The story has some parts that you can only accept because it's a kung-fu movie, and other parts that are just absurd. It is, at heart, the story of a man who overcomes adversity by boldly being able to. Still, there were some genuinely subversive moments that made it good to watch even when nobody was punching anyone.

I only heard about Ip Man, though, because of a glowing review I read of Ip Man 2 in Seattle Weekly. The sequel's score stands well above the original's on Rotten Tomatoes, so I was quite excited about 2 after seeing 1.

Girlfriend caught it before I did, but Ip Man 2 is basically Rocky IV. (Actually I think if Sylvester Stallone had thought to go to Sammo Hung for his fight choreography from Rocky II on, the world would be a substantially better place.) It also occurred to me belatedly that the original audience wouldn't have identified at all with the white antagonist, making the movie possibly less morally complex than it had even seemed at first. I am actually aware of nothing that Ip Man 2 does better than its antecessor, which is why it's so weird to me that the critics should prefer it. Is there something wrong with movie critics? (I notice that RT's audience ratings line up better with my own opinion, which lends itself to that theory.)

Anyway, Ip Man 2 has the same writer and the same director as Ip Man, as well as rather too much of the original cast. As a writer (finger quotes optional), I'm inclined to say it lands at the feet of the writer, but I can't say what constraints he, or anyone else, was working under.

It might be useful to look at some other sequels that suffer from similar symptoms. Sherlock Holmes, Iron Man, and Casino Royale all recently yielded inferior sequels. The first two changed writers, and the last one changed directors. Yet they all seemed to fall flat on so many levels, including what just looked like lazier editing from the returning directors and lazier scripts from the returning writers. Were they bored?

(I'm also of the opinion that the whole problem starts with The Godfather Part II, but if you think that that one was better than the original I won't fight you over it.)

Thankfully there have also been some recent exceptions. Carriers, if you will. Spider-Man and Batman Begins both had sequels that were actually better. Spider-Man changed writers completely, but Batman kept the same writers and added Jonathan Nolan to the mix (and I'd be surprised if he didn't have any influence on the first one). However it was done, neither one of them slackened off.

(On a side note, The Dark Knight Rises apparently has the same writing team as The Dark Knight, which, according to the evidence examined so far, suggests that... nothing.)

There's one common thread among all of these. It's subjective, but we're talking about art, so, yeah. A sequel basically has to have a new character, since a good original takes its cast to the natural result of their interactions.

The new character has to be strong enough to change the dynamic of the movie. Otherwise you just end up with your sequel's protagonists retreading the same arcs they went through last time. See Quantum of Solace, in which James Bond relives the last five minutes of Casino Royale, chasing down a bad guy who's so inert that the big reveal about his evil scheme doesn't make 007 bat an eyelash. See The Godfather Part II, whose most interesting character is dead before the movie starts, and whose present-day storyline unfolds pretty much exactly the way the end of the first movie implied it would.

On the other hand, need I go into a long explanation of the significance of the Joker in The Dark Knight? Or, take the progenitor of superior sequels, Terminator 2. The important new character in that movie actually isn't the T-1000 or John Connor; it's the original Terminator, back but with a completely new set of motivations.

On the other other hand, there's the sequels whose new characters are just weird and annoying. Not to name names.

And while the quality  of the new characters is more of an indicator of overall quality, it's not perfect, and it still looks like another symptom, rather than a definitive cause.

Nor can we just say that a franchise/character/premise has run out of good ideas. Iron Man 2, Ip Man 2*, and Spider-Man 3 (sigh) both suffer from an overabundance of plots. What they needed was to be pared down so that subplots would have room to grow naturally, instead of being crowded out by competing real plots.

I could go on like this but I think my thesis is still that the cause is still unknown. Study must continue, though, for only then do we stand a chance of finding a cure.

* I feel the need to point out that Ip Man, unlike the other entries in this list, is a person's actual name. While I admit to comic book heroes being overrepresented in this post, he is just a real person with a name that's a bit unfortunate to Anglophones.