Alone at the Microphone

V for Vendetta, by Alan Moore and David Lloyd

2011-07-12T17:57:00.003-06:00

How I have gotten this far on my nerd cred without having read this book is beyond me. Thank all things good that I was not mauled for ever saying "The only Moore book I've read is Watchmen. (And no, the movie of V doesn't count. Not even close. Not after reading this. Whoa.)

V for Vendetta is hardly the first story about a society where people don't stand up for their rights, those inalienable pieces of civilization that so often become classified as "privileges" and are pushed aside for "necessity's sake." The few seeking to control the many under the guise of order and safety, and sometimes even prosperity, happens all the time in the real world, that precise one in which we live. Moore just fabricates a new one, one that might have been conceivably possible at the time he wrote it.

Though the key has changed, the melody stays the same.

As is often the case, one voice raised does little good. A lot more than no voice at all, to be sure -- but one voice can be quelched. One voice can be silenced. One voice can be talked around and over until it sounds like mindless babble. Sometimes, when the drivel is loudest, it becomes reason.

By not raising our voices all at once, all together, to speak out and say "no," V argues, we relinquish control. We hand over freedoms and our liberties hilt-first.

In the story, the oppression comes in the forms of genocide, of pervasive surveillance, of an inability to speak up without being brutally muted. But really, how is that different than the America we live in right now? (Other than the pervasive surveillance. We might not be at Moore-level England, but we have already given up far too much right to privacy, and too much of it entirely willingly.) Our government (not to be confused with our executive branch, though that branch as a whole is playing far too nice and like enormous wusses) has been deciding and is continuing to decide that the privileges of the very few, very wealthy people and the biggest of corporations are to be preserved above and beyond the most basic rights of every working-class and middle-class woman, man, and hell, even child in the United States of America.

And what do we do? We bitch and moan, we gripe and complain. But those deciding that the richest cannot pay a little more in taxes, that we have to play chicken with our country's future in order that those least harmed by the latest recession continue to thrive, have not had the fear of the public put in them.

If all people in this country voted only by their financial interests in the next election, each and every one of those bastards would be run out of office by 90% of the vote. (And for once, I'm being conservative.)

If every person in this country would let it be known that they cared about what decisions are being made on the public's behalf and that every person were willing to do something about it, I guarantee the current financial "crisis" would be a non-event. It would be past. It would never have been existent.

This isn't about Republicans or Democrats. It's not about labels. V is labeled a "terrorist" by the English government because he fights against its interests. But what V has that modern-day terrorists don't is this: he is not fighting for an ideology, but for ideals. He is not blowing up buildings to make people afraid, but to open their eyes and bring them to action. He attacks symbols not for what they represent, but for how they have been corrupted from their origins.

Do we need to blow up buildings to be heard? Hell no. But our society is not as oppressed as V's England.

Not yet.

Al"brew"querque

2011-06-21T10:51:00.002-06:00

Well, whaddya know. I've got a new blog project -- but don't worry, it won't spell the end of Alone at the Microphone. It's completely different in every meaningful way. (Except for, you know, being a blog.)

It's called Al"brew"querque, and it's a blog about beer. Jenny and I began co-writing pieces a while back about beer and the places one finds beer. We finally figured that other people might enjoy what we have to say. And so far, the response has been positive.

So mosey on over to Al"brew"querque and get your yeast on! (Wait, that sounds bad. Get your malt on? Get your hops on? Get your water on? Get 'em all on!)

A Shadow in Summer, by Daniel Abraham

2011-06-10T11:26:00.002-06:00

About a month ago, I had the extreme pleasure of interviewing Daniel Abraham, a fellow graduate of the University Honors Program at UNM and one heck of an up-and-coming fantasy writer. This post is technically for the first book in his Long Price Quartet, A Shadow in Summer, though we only discuss that quartet briefly in the interview below.

Rather than write more thoughts of my own, I'd like you all to see how the interview went. Mr. Abraham was incredibly gracious to let me conduct this interview for Mythprint*, and his responses gave my mind-cow plenty of cud to chew.

*An abbreviated form of this interview appears in the June 2011 edition of Mythprint, the periodical of the Mythopoeic Society. While it doesn't appear to be up yet, the full text (identical to the below) is intended to appear here. The interview was over a month ago, and obviously I read the book before that... but I wanted to wait until Mythprint had a chance to run before reproducing the interview here.

Here you go (I am in italics, Mr. Abraham in normal font).

Daniel, we are tickled that you will be attending Mythcon 42 in Albuquerque as part of our Writers’ Track series. Most of the attending authors are from this region, though all of you are published nationally. So it’s nice to get some people who’ve made it in a very real sense.

God it’s weird to be in that group! It doesn’t feel like it, that’s all.

Have you experienced yet what it’s like to be recognized as “Daniel Abraham,” the name on the book cover?

I’ve had a couple times where people acknowledged that I exist and it was weird, it was very strange. The tiny, little, small pathetic drop of fame that I have gotten is still pretty surreal.

When we set up this interview, you said you wanted to talk about “low-status” literature and its role. So what have you been thinking on that subject?

I have this kink about economics. One of the things that I get out of it is that you don’t judge people by what they say, you judge people by where they spend their money. So, for example, if I say that by god I’m a leftist Democrat and I spend all of my money supporting right-wing Republicans, I’m a right-wing Republican. When you have somebody who’s doing one thing and saying another, you judge them by what they do, not what they say. So I take that and look at what books people are buying. I understand there’s one class of very high status books. A Brief History of Time. Tremendous best seller. I’m not sure anybody read it. I think we mostly got it to put on our coffee tables to show that we’re very smart.

This is the Stephen Hawking book?

Yes. Nothing against Stephen Hawking, I’m sure it’s a fine book. I have it. I haven’t read it. Abstract cosmology is not something that actually, I think, speaks to the American soul in the way that seeming smarter than the guy next to you really does. So I think there is this class of books that you buy in order to look clever. And that’s cool. I understand why you do that. But then there’s a whole bunch of books, like the majority of publishing, that are guilty pleasures. And they’re the kind of places I play. They are the fantasy, and the science fiction and the mystery and romance—romance is still the one that everybody, I think, looks down on intellectually. I mean, folks writing space opera sneer at romance. And romance has I think the largest and most powerful following. So something interesting is happening there. This goes back to judging things by what you put your money on. They put their money on romance, and they put their money on genre, on these things that don’t lend social status. So they must be doing something else. I think it’s clear that romance is sitting on a huge discomfort that we have as a culture, as a nation, about whether we individually are lovable or if we’re going to die alone and rejected. It’s a huge seller because we are all suffering that. I think when we see this huge popular upwelling in some genre, in some group of related literary projects that aren’t respectable, that they’re offering comfort to things that need to be comforted. I think that urban fantasy is sitting on a real discomfort about women and power. When I say that it sounds like this is some sort of necessarily progressive feminist thoughtful literature. I’m not saying that. I’m saying it’s feeding off of and lending comfort to a real confusion and a real discomfort. Not that it’s offering solutions to it. People confuse that. Urban fantasy isn’t about reconciling our feelings with women and power any more than romance is about how to build a healthy relationship. They’re not didactic, they’re not there to improve you. They’re there to offer you comfort. Genres are where fears pool. So you see genres that have gone away—Westerns are gone. They were huge, and they’re gone. Whatever they were answering, people stopped needing it. I don’t know what it was. And I don’t know that all of the genres we have now will survive forever, I don’t expect they will. But right now I think those literary projects, those low-status things, are really the best barometer of what’s bothering us.

You called these the guilty pleasures and very much separated them from how-the-universe-works books. Why do you think that, when we feel the need to address something, we want to ensconce ourselves into it, make contact with it, but not necessarily figure it out? Why romance books instead of how-to-be-happy-in-a-relationship books?

I don’t think those are antithetical. I don’t think you can’t do both, but I don’t think that what you come for is a how-to book. It’s the same reason you don’t always eat granola for breakfast. We do things that are pleasurable and comforting because we are creatures of pleasure and comfort. And solving problems realistically kind of makes for lousy stories. Having a really sane, balanced, centered life means you’re low drama. That’s not what fiction does.

If as you say this low status literature addresses something in our societies that makes it popular, what is it about fantasy literature in general, or yours specifically, that makes people crave it?

Epic fantasy—think J.R.R. Tolkien, even Stephen Donaldson—is about war, and we are in America right now really confused about war because we’ve got like two and a half of them going on right now, and we don’t talk about it and we don’t really admit to our sacrifices about it and there’s this weariness about war. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings is a story about the futility of war, it’s a story about the morality of disarmament, about the actions of individuals being the only force of salvation. That’s a real criticism of war. If you look at Martin and A Game of Thrones, what you have is this fantasy that’s very reminiscent of the Wars of the Roses in which there are no good guys, there aren’t many bad guys, there is this tremendous multivalent ambition and it’s a bleak, bleak world. Now why does that speak to us? Because we’re reading The Economist, and it’s there.

What I see in people’s reactions to me is that people who like my stuff like it because I love all my characters. I love my bad guys, too. I want to see my villains forgiven. I want to see them understood. I think that may be the literary project I’m working on. I didn’t mean it that way, but when people read my epic fantasy, I can get them to root for whoever’s point of view the chapter is written in. Even when the characters are going to kill each other. And it’s not ambivalent so much as multivalent.

It’s interesting that you’re talking about war when at least the beginning of The Long Price Quartet has this threat of war lingering, depending on the outcomes of these few individuals we see in the narrative. But there is no war.

Not in that one. Book three is called An Autumn War because there’s this war. But I don’t like battles. I don’t like battle scenes. I don’t like fight choreography very much.

I’m going to give you two scenes. There’s the battle scene, where you have the great armies arrayed against each other, and the tactics of the battle, and the blood and the screaming and the destruction and the courage. There’s another scene after the battle, we have three soldiers walking down the street one way, and a woman and her child walking the other. Everybody knows that the woman’s husband probably died in the battle that the other three soldiers just won, and one of the soldiers gives the kid a piece of candy. One of those tells me more, one of those is more interesting to me. And it’s the one where you’re thinking, “OK, if that kid takes the piece of candy, if he doesn’t take it, what does that mean? What does it mean that it was offered?” It seems to me the violence is actually pretty simple, and the things that surround violence are more interesting.

Have you read Tolkien’s “Homecoming of Beorthnoth?” It’s his piece set on the field of “The Battle of Maldon” after the battle has ended. To me, that’s the same sort of thing where you have the battle and then that moment afterward that says much more.

And who we are, and what the consequences are.

I have seen similar discussion going on just this week with the Osama bin Laden assassination, where people are saying, how do we respond to this? What do we do? Because how we treat our enemy says more about us than it does about the enemy.

I have been thinking a lot about bin Laden and about his kind of literary project. He was an amazing self promoter. He was stunning. In point of fact, he wasn’t very much of a threat to us, you know? More people die every year from car wrecks. If you look at it coldly, and you look at the numbers, al Qaeda’s not a big threat, and what he did was not a big threat. But the narrative that came out of it was so powerful, and the way that he married that narrative to his personality and to his life was so powerful and so effective that I look at his death and I see this huge cultural relief. The catharsis we feel because that one guy died, I think is a testament to how well he did his job. You know, I’m not particularly a man of violence, and I felt the world lighten up a little bit when I heard the news. And yeah, I think there’s a difference between celebrating his death and acknowledging that release.

I should probably make sure you get your plugs in. You have written more than The Long Price Quartet, and we’re hoping that you can get Mythcon 42 attendees reading other things. But The Long Price Quartet is set in this very Asian-like culture which is very unusual in Western fantasy. So can you talk about the decision you made to write in that kind of world?

Especially when you’re starting off as a writer, there’s tremendous encouragement to embrace originality and do something new. I wanted to do something that felt very different, that stood out from what other folks were up to. And one of the ways to do that was to have it not be the traditional pseudo-medieval world. I also did some weird stuff with the structures of the books, with the big time jumps between the books and a fairly small cast of characters. And what I was really reaching for was to do something I hadn’t seen before. And I think those books did what I wanted them to do. They didn’t light the world on fire sales wise, but that’s always a crap shoot. But artistically, I’m very comfortable with how those books came out.

How do you feel they impacted your development as a writer?

They gave me practice. The other mandate going into that project was to figure out how to write a novel, because I did a lot of short stories before those books. And I felt pretty good about the rhythm of a short story and how a short story works. And I was pretty clear that I didn’t know how to write a novel, because, I’d done three, maybe three and a half, four, before I started The Long Price Quartet. And they sucked less each time. But they still sucked. And in fact, when I finished the first book of The Long Price Quartet, A Shadow in Summer, my first readers, the people who were critiquing it as I went along, my writers’ group, all said, “It’s beautifully written, I don’t know what’s going on, and I hate your main character.” And I wound up throwing the book out completely and rewriting it from scratch.

Being part of that writers’ group in New Mexico and being from here—I had a friend once call Albuquerque a “not real part of the world”—as an author, how has the Southwest influenced you or provided you with inspiration?

One of the things that’s been interesting to me, thinking about growing up here, is that the American narrative of race has never been my experience. When you look at the American narrative of race, the story we tell ourselves about race, it’s about white folks and black folks. Where I grew up, it’s about Anglos and Hispanics. And that’s a totally different dynamic. I live in a place that is the occupied territories. I live in a border town. I live in a place where some people identify as American and some people identify as Mexican, and I’ve always felt a little bit like a foreigner traveling other parts of the nation. I’ve always felt a little bit outside the narrative of my culture. And I kind of like that. That sense of being from something that’s not quite real—and when we say not quite real, we mean not quite part of the overwhelming narrative. That gives you, I think, a certain power over the narrative. I like that. I enjoy that. Also, growing up I had access to literatures that you don’t get other places. My dad would read me short stories by Enrique Anderson Imbert, and he would translate them on the fly as he read. And they were all these amazing stories about these fantastical and weird and disturbing things. Part of my experience of literature was those things I don’t know that you get when you’re living in other parts of the country.

Racism’s going to be any place. No matter where you go, when you get folks who identify as different races, it’s going to happen. We’re a tribal species, it’s what we do—but here, you have that racial divide with power on both sides. I’m in New Mexico and if you have a Hispanic surname, you’re electable. When you have that level of power equality and difference and acceptance and distance, it’s… I think New Mexico is a very humane place. Apart from the grinding poverty.

Your chance to pump yourself. Do you have any new or upcoming works you’d like Mythprint readers and Mythcon 42 attendees to know about?

Specifically, yes. I’d like you to know about The Dragon’s Path, which is the first book in The Dagger and the Coin series, my next epic fantasy. I’m also coming out with an urban fantasy series under the pen name M.L.N. Hanover, The Black Sun’s Daughter. So if you want to talk about what I think urban fantasy does, and women and power, there’s that. And I have a book coming out with Ty Franck [also attending Mythcon 42] called Leviathan Wakes, which is a space opera, coming out in June. Right before Mythcon. It has a big spaceship on it.

Perfect! Thank you, Daniel. I’ll see you again at Mythcon 42 this July in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

Dublin-bound!

2011-04-05T11:28:00.003-06:00

Holy Ghost, Batman. I got into Trinity!

That's right. I'll be moving to Dublin in the fall and attending Trinity College Dublin. Coláiste na Tríonóide, Baile Átha Cliath. The College of the Holy and Undivided Trinity of Queen Elizabeth near Dublin.

And I'll be studying in the Oscar Wilde Centre for Irish Writing.

Forgive me if I sound like I'm gloating. I probably am! (And it's deserved. I found out yesterday, and my feet haven't touched the ground since!)

That just leaves two things for now: crossing my fingers that Jenny hears soon and gets in, too; and finding some Oscar Wilde to read this summer.

Yippee-aye-oh-kai-ay, ye feckers!

Faith Healer, by Brian Friel, and Rashomon, by Ryunosuke Akutagawa

2011-03-27T21:34:00.006-06:00

Two books in one post? What will he do next?!

At first, one might believe these two books to be as opposite in character as they are in nationality. The Japanese stories "Rashomon" and "In the Grove" by Ryunosuke Akutagawa (also made into a film together called Rashomon) are set in old Japan, and the latter deals with a murder in the woods that the investigator cannot solve because each person's account is equally different and equally plausible. Brian Friel's Irish play Faith Healer lets three characters recount their time traveling together as a team of sorts. (Sidebar: I saw Faith Healer performed in Dublin back in 2006, entirely by accident. It starred Ralph Fiennes, Ingrid Craigie, and Ian McDiarmid. Single best performance I have ever seen. Of anything.)

Yet the stories share, as an integral (and perhaps defining) component, an entire lack of reliability of its narrators. Not just your usual questionable-narrator syndrome that you learn about in sophomore English; no, I'm talking about each of our storytellers contradicting the others in the details and the generalities, in tone and in spirit, perhaps intentionally, but probably not. Perception is reality, my mother always reminded me; these stories remind us of the subjectivity of our own memories.

They also throw into deep doubt what, exactly, truth is.

I read both of these stories recently, but not quite near the date of this post. Like I said, I was familiar with Faith Healer already, but in talking with two of the writers I respect most in this world, I was twice recommended the works of Akutagawa--not just for pleasant reading, but because a story I am working on relies very heavily on perception to interpret fact (if "fact" exists).

Both these stories are small, Akutagawa's especially so. But they pack a punch. What people remember (and how they remember it) says more about them than it does about the events of the past. I think we could all do well to be swiftly reminded that our own interpretations of the world usually won't jive with another's. And if we're lucky, we'll get such reminders through stories that don't end in death and sacrifice.

The Naked Pint, by Christina Perozzi & Hallie Beaune

2011-03-21T21:25:00.000-06:00

Click to buy the book!

The first beer I ever sneaked a sip of? Budweiser. I was something like two years old, and since then, my tastes have gone nowhere but up.

I proclaimed myself a beer snob well before I was legally allowed to drink in the United States. (Hey, come on. I spent a semester in England when I was twenty. And even then I preferred Nelson's Revenge to the nationally distributed Carling.) But I didn't know the first thing about beer, or the process of making it, or the meanings behind all these different varieties. I just knew what I liked, and what I sort of liked, and what I didn't like. And really, still, that's all that matters.

But I'm seldom satisfied sticking with a "just because" type of answer when it relates to something I'm passionate about. And I am passionate about beer. I've begun attempting to pair brews with meals, with seasons, with memories. I compulsively check the label on the neck of each brown bottle I hold. And yet, I developed these habits without knowing precisely what makes a pilsner different than a blonde, or what Centennial hops even means.

This book helped me decode all those aspects of beer. Am I now an expert? Heck no. But I probably know more than three quarters of my fellow patrons in each bar I enter. And I have to be clear: that doesn't make me more passionate about beer than they are, and it doesn't make me any better a beer drinker. We all still know what we like, and what we don't like. But now I know, for my own self-gratification, much more about the nuances involved in the brewing process--ingredients, temperatures, types of yeast, regional specialties--than I ever could have guessed.

For me, that makes beer drinking even more fun. And that's saying something.

The Lord of the Rings, by J.R.R. Tolkien

2011-03-11T18:25:00.001-07:00

When I see people—old acquaintances, former friends, ex-teammates, high school classmates—I am always stricken by how much they have changed. Of course, they are still the same in so many ways: they are recognizable, their ways of speaking sounds exactly as they always did, their interests are at least similar to what they used to be. But I never notice those constants in the way I do the differences. An outgrowth of facial hair, a difference in height, a complete reversal of political beliefs. Or I just see the things that have certainly always been present, but I see now cast in a new light: just how long a bridge of a nose is, or how harshly comments are made.

Then inevitably I wonder the age-old question: Who has really done the changing? Is it me? Is that why everything about these people seems so strange?

When I reread The Lord of the Rings this winter, the pages felt more like long-removed friends than local buds. (I hadn’t read the books in four years—my longest stretch since the first time I read them in high school.) The story is perfect winter reading for me, for that is the season of comfort and familiarity. But part of what makes Tolkien such an admirable writer (and part of the very reason I’m one of the thousands, if not millions, of people who have read the books multiple times) is his ability to show his readers something new every time through the texts. Since last reading The Lord of the Rings, I’ve co-taught a class on Tolkien and assisted with the editing of a scholarly volume on teaching his works. I’ve had my own scholarship published, I’ve written more creatively than I had in all my prior years, and I’ve experienced life abroad. Not only have I undoubtedly changed, but my experience with Tolkien’s books has grown, too.

Perhaps for both those reasons, I discovered new facets during this reading. Never before had I paid so much attention to Tolkien’s intricate wording, particularly in his descriptions of natural scenes and features. He writes with an unceasing reverence for the earth that I had not before noticed, and thus never truly appreciated. Never had I read The Lord of the Rings while myself in the primary mindset of an author—always before I was a student, an academic, a fan, but this time I read Tolkien as a palate-cleanser of sorts while working on my own writing. I cannot read Tom Robbins or Kurt Vonnegut or Jonathan Safran-Foer or John Irving while I am writing, because inevitably I will emulate their styles. Yet I hold Tolkien the craftsman in higher esteem than each of them. Reading his words while writing my own motivated me and drove me ever onward—all without leaving his own literary taste in my brain. Rather, I felt the freshness of his passages, the crispness of his scenes, the richness of his writing flowing through my mind in a way that I could not imitate, and so I remain inspired even now by having experienced how a truly beautiful text feels, even after so long apart.

Globish, by Robert McCrum

2011-03-04T11:01:00.000-07:00

To the editors and publishers at W.W. Norton:

In my academic career, both as a student and as a personally-driven scholar, I've come to respect the Norton name as a pillar of intellectual credibility, scholarly integrity, and overall professionalism.

Then I read Globish.

I do not intend to be overly harsh. Globish as a book is based on a solid concept and its topic--the growth of English as a useful, adaptable, and already-established basis for world communication--is imminently relevant, perhaps even more so than its author could have anticipated. (I think here of the protests in the Middle East up to this point in 2011, in which the sentiments of placard-holders have been so often expressed in English. Some widely-distributed pictures from Egypt even depicted solidarity with union protesters in Wisconsin--a sentiment expressed, of course, in English.) As a lingua franca, English (or, as Robert Crum might argue it has become, Globish) rears up in relevance in the international news every day. The phenomenon of language in the third millennium develops even more quickly, it might seem, than our technology.

Unfortunately, I feel McCrum fails to discuss just exactly "How the English Language Became the World's Language" until page 275. In a 287-page book. Those thirteen pages are the Epilogue. (Yes, he touches on the subject plenty of times before the Epilogue. But not in the concentrated, analytical matter I expect from a book with the word "how" in the tag line.)

Personally, I love studying the evolution of a language, both culturally and linguistically. And for the most part, I appreciate what McCrum does for the first 274 pages of the book: He establishes the historical settings of the world's English, its initial travels to and transformations in England, its ocean voyages, its contact with foreign words and cultures and ideas, its use in many of the great metamorphoses of the second millennium. But in my interpretation, all those facets (helpful though they may be to a truly full understanding of the English language) amount to nothing more than the very foundation of Globish. Reading Globish felt like reading a book about how Babe Ruth became the greatest hitter in his generation, but which spends ninety percent of its pages discussing his childhood baseball days and his first breakthrough with the Boston Red Sox.

The history of the English language, having had plenty written about it for those interested in such a history, ought to have been the springboard from which McCrum launched his involved discussion of Globish as Globish (rather than as simply English). I'm thinking about a chapter would have sufficed.

I have done editing work, so I understand what it is to approach with criticism an author who has put a great deal of time into a piece. I also know that any time a good editor announces to an author that the majority of a book needs to be scrapped and the remaining portion expanded and developed, the book will be stronger for it. I feel that one of the editors of this book needed to say something similar to McCrum.

Perhaps I could have gotten past my expectations of the book (only enhanced by the title and the tag line) had the book been effectively edited on a technical level. It was not. I will not pull out examples here of where the editing or the typesetting had gone awry, or where it seems that chunks of text had been dragged away from their homes and airlifted into foreign sentences. But they exist. I will not point out in this letter instances of unlinked ideas and random transitions in the text. But they exist. If you would like me to provide any such examples before this book reaches another printing (if indeed it does), I would be happy to do so. (Perhaps you would even be willing to contract the work out to me, as the current editors working with this title did such a poor job the first time through.)

I cannot say that my experience with Globish will prevent me from picking up other titles published by Norton. The track record is too strong. But in this case, I feel that a great pitch for a fascinating topic was made, and beyond that point Norton washed its hands of any responsibility. Please do let me know if another book is ever scheduled for publication that will go into the depth of Globish that I desire. My taste was whetted, even if my mental red pencil was dulled to a nub.

Yours sincerely,

Z.N. Hively

P.S. I see now that Globish has reached its paperback run. I have the book in hardcover. While I'm sure that no substantive changes along the lines I discuss were made, I do hope that the paperback version has been cleaned up in further proofings.

Where the Red Fern Grows, by Wilson Rawls

2011-03-02T11:30:00.001-07:00

The first time I read this book, or had it read to me, I was in the second grade. We finished the final two chapters one morning before school, and I had to go in two hours late because it made me feel so much.

People change. We toughen.

Much has happened since I was seven. I'm a man now, in every external way that counts. And when my lovely partner came home from work and said she had to read Where the Red Fern Grows for class, and would I like to read it with her, I wondered if I would feel as much when I reached the end.

Since the second grade, I've held my dog's head while he died. How could two fictional hound dogs compare?

I've earned a degree learning to analyze literature, and I've become a writer, attuning myself to the way the words in a book are assembled, and the ideas behind the words. What if I find out the book was badly written, or I bog myself down in picking it apart and end up entirely incapable of just feeling?

Last night, we finished the book. I learned from my mistakes, so we read it before bed instead of before work. I'm still fighting the heavy dryness behind my eyes, and I know I look like hell.

If I had written the book, yeah, I would have done plenty of things differently. But none of those things matters, because two little red hounds from the pages of a childhood book are still able to reduce me to tears as I write this.

Those two pups answered a lot of prayers and gave their boy and his mama and papa the love, purpose, and direction they needed. Now I'm not saying what they're doing for me right now is on a par with that, but they've brought me back to this project. They're reconnecting me with my words and thoughts. Reminding me that books are meant to be felt first, and perhaps analyzed second, if at all. Refreshing my soul and my tear ducts. And standing as a testament to love as the ultimate human emotion.

If only we all knew so much by the second grade. Thank you, Little Ann, and you too, Old Dan, for reminding me.

Practical Demonkeeping, by Christopher Moore

2010-12-28T15:53:00.000-07:00

Click to buy the book!

Christopher Moore is known for making people laugh. I've read several of his books in years past, but for this one, I decided to go back to where it all began: his very first published novel, Practical Demonkeeping.

Some people say you shouldn't judge a book by anything outside of its covers; that is, if it is to be compared to other texts, it should be done solely on the basis of its contents without any reference to its time of publication, its chronological relation to other books, and so on. Others argue that a book cannot be fully understood without looking at where it falls in an author's milieu.

Now I'm not saying people are debating such topics on Christopher Moore's books. (For all I know, though, they are.) But I will say that if one is familiar with Moore's work, and one reads this book, one will note some interesting tidbits. For one, Moore causes laughter at a regular pace right from the start. Perhaps he's developed the knack, like a good cask-aged beer develops flavor, but it's all there from the get-go. He's also good at weaving together a location, the people in it, and ensuring that everyone he's bothered to introduce plays a significant role by the end.

Perhaps Moore isn't as outrageous in Demonkeeping as he can be in other books. Perhaps the characters aren't as deep, and maybe they don't develop quite as much as they do in other books. But it's a glimpse into his origins, and heck, I enjoyed reading it.

1066: The Hidden History in the Bayeux Tapestry, by Andrew Bridgeford

2010-12-28T10:53:00.000-07:00

Click here to buy the book!

A word I can't pronounce? A year that wasn't in my lifetime? Thoughts of middle school history class! Shudder!

Now hold on just a gosh-darn minute. I'll admit many (though not all) of my history teachers played a part in such reactions to historical references. The number one flaw in my experience of "social studies" courses was simple: the teachers and the textbooks FAILED TO MAKE THIS HISTORY RELEVANT TO MY LIFE.

If history were no longer relevant, we wouldn't study it. So clearly, all that junk about peoples and rulers and wars had some point. Bridgeford's book puts Point Number One in three-inch digits atop the front page: 1066, one of the only years I (and probably most of you) were forced to memorize in school.

Need a refresher? 1066: the year that a group of warriors from France, often simply (and somewhat erroneously) referred to as Normans, invaded the island of Great Britain and defeated the English king's forces at the Battle of Hastings. Big whoop. But from this battle, and the shift in British power that ensued, was born the language I'm using to type, that you know how to read, and that now dominates the commerce, politics, and technology of the world.

So a pretty big deal. And we all learn about (or ought to learn about) it in school. So what's left for Bridgeford to contribute?

Well, there's this piece of cloth, you see, called the Bayeux Tapestry. Someone made it a lot of years ago to illustrate and commemorate the Battle of Hastings, and the events that conspired to cause it. Everyone thought they understood this woven storybook, and used it to help illustrate history. Then Mr. Bridgeford comes along, sees things very differently, and unveils what subversive tales he reads into the tapestry.

If you're not already hooked (I am, and I already read the book!), I should mention that this book is not just a historian blabbering on for 300 pages. Bridgeford illuminates a tale of political intrigue, romantic scandal, noble heroics, and manipulative backstabbing that you couldn't make up if you tried. He does so with the novelist's flair, the art critic's keen eye, and the historian's desire for truth.

I refuse to go into the details, because that's what reading the book is for. But this is one of the best books I've read, and easily the best history I've read. If we'd been assigned this book in high school... well, my classmates and I would have spent more time studying than singing Doobie Brothers songs in the back row. (Which we did.)

The Ladies of Grace Adieu and Other Stories, by Susanna Clarke

2010-10-24T13:05:00.000-06:00

Click to buy the book!

You may remember how Jonathan Strange basically made me say "Eff the rules of what makes a good book."

Well, The Ladies of Grace Adieu and Other Stories maintained the same Austen-like quality of writing, preserved the same tongue-firmly-in-cheek approach, and applied the same standards to Clarke's modified world as the book's lengthier (by about ten times) predecessor. Which is to say, I should have simply loved it.

But part of what made Strange so appealing was its depth, its complexity, its nuanced expectation that the reader would pay attention, because what happened on page 7 was likely to come back into play eight hundred pages later. In this way, Clarke's writing is much like J.K. Rowling's. I hoped fervently that Rowling would let Harry Potter lie after the seventh installment, because in my opinion no further contribution to the world of Hogwarts could enrich it in any way that benefited my readings (or re-readings) of the original series.

Of course I was happy that Clarke was not done with the world of Strange. But at the same time, my idea of the world was whole. There was unexplored depth there, but it served as part of the magic and charm of the original. And these short stories, while they matched the tenor of Strange, could not hold the same depth. They are part of the foundation of the world, but just as I can appreciate the Eiffel Tower or the Taj Mahal without knowing what keeps them from falling over, I don't think we needed more glimpses into Strange's and Norrell's world of magicians.

Or if we do need them, I'd rather they match the grandeur of her debut novel without merely serving as extensions of it.

Save the Cat! by Blake Snyder

2010-10-23T15:40:00.001-06:00

Click to buy the book!

An idea persists about art that its creation, in any form it possesses, is somehow spontaneous and entirely right-brained; that it is emotional and not rational, free-flowing and uninhibited, not planned and not restrained or dammed or controlled.

Art, simply, is pure. (Or it would be more often, if in order to be considered "successful" by anyone outside the artist's community it didn't need to be made commercially viable.) But the belief among many that "purity" necessarily contains all those above descriptions contributes to some extent, I think, to the common conception that artists don't have to "work." Of course, the time needed to accomplish much art is recognized; artists, however, fail to obtain similar recognition of their time, efforts, and value. Many never understand that while the creativity of art may be spontaneous, the craft of it almost never is.

The need for planning, for working and reworking, for drafting and amending and cutting and altering, is as prevalent in the written arts any other. Which is why Save the Cat is as relevant to fiction writing as it is to screenwriting, and why it's fast becoming a bedside and writing-table standard for me.

We (and I'm as guilty as anyone) like to believe, love to feel, that quality films and books fulfill the standard of excellence just by being inherently good. We don't want to realize that behind the quality lies a structure, and that the structure applies to all sorts of works within and outside of the genre.

But it's there. Good artists can bend the structure, play with it (and, more importantly, within it), but we can hardly get rid of it. Rather than lamenting this fact of storytelling, I've chosen to embrace it, to study it, and to apply it to my own work. And so far, the results are telling.

(Fair warning, though: it's also made me an annoyingly critical movie viewer. In the middle of a film, I'll burst out with "Ooh, there's the whiff of death!" or "But he didn't save the cat!" I don't see how you could read this book and not do the same. Consider yourself cautioned.)

Le Noise, by Neil Young

2010-10-03T13:08:00.000-06:00

Click to get the music!

With lots of blogging to catch up on, I'm going to shake things up a bit by:

a) going out of chronological order.

b) shamelessly suggesting that you obtain the object of the post.

c) writing about something that is not a book at all.

(Seriously, get the album. Download it. Rip it off a CD. Buy the vinyl, and a new turntable with excellent speakers to go with it. I don't care. Just get it.)

Everyone, quite literally, who knows me knows (or is entirely unobservant and dense to the fact) that I am a Neil Young fan. Or I would be, if "fan" adequately covered the unabashed respect I have for Young as a musician, as an individual, as a philanthropist, as an advocate. Goodness knows that such admiration falls far short of blanket admiration for his work. (Don't talk to me about Are You Passionate?, for chrissakes.) But even when I fail to enjoy the musical products that Young releases, I can appreciate that he is going for something, even if what, exactly, that is lies beyond my personal bounds of certainty.

And I'll admit that when I first heard rumblings of Le Noise, the fan in me was skeptical. Oh, sure, I could appreciate that Young was experimenting with new sound. I was ecstatic that he was writing, touring, performing, releasing new music. (Or, at least in the case of "Hitchhiker," old music I hadn't heard before.) I was tickled at the prospect of an album and a concert with just Neil Young and his instruments of choice--no band, no backup singers; just a cigar store Indian with haunting wolf's-eye reflection.

Then, eight days before the release of the record, I saw Neil Young in Panama City, Florida, where he performed six of the eight songs on Le Noise. The show--the entire trip--highlighted the best of what makes Neil Young so influential in my life (and, really, in my art). He brought people together from around the country. He put on this mini-tour to benefit the people along the Gulf Coast. He was accompanied by his family and by LincVolt, his converted electric Lincoln Continental, to promote his view of an alternate world. And alone on stage, none of that mattered. He was a man with his music, and except for the residual (and powerful) aura of Allen Toussaint, nothing else. Maybe seeing the new songs given the electric spark of life from all of twenty feet away made the album better in my mind.

Maybe. But it's a damn fine record, regardless. (And a film.)

I can say very little that hasn't been said elsewhere. Google the album, read the reviews. They're not all glowing, but they're largely well written. And they say everything I could say about the recording process, the sonics, the collaboration with the producer, the power and simplicity of the lyrics.

But what they can't say is that Neil Young, a musician who has shaped my personal views of art, of integrity, of relevance, and of the power of language, has once again revealed to me what is possible. On this record, he doesn't lose his voice, his style, or his drive, all of which combine awesomely on even his middling works. But he takes those same components and puts out anything but "another Neil Young record."

More artists in any genre could learn something from that approach. I hope to.

The Order of Things, by Lynne Hinton

2010-10-03T12:07:00.002-06:00

Click to buy the book!

Lately I've become fascinated with the idea of "perspective" relative to any artistic endeavor.

A new concept? Hardly. But for the first time outside of literature courses, I'm finally tackling the concept and the ways in which it affects the story told, the feelings conveyed, and the effects on the reader/viewer/listener.

The Order of Things, through the use of extensive dialogue, accomplishes the feat of having, essentially, two narrators--the first person narrator of the text, and the next-door inmate at the mental institution who talks with her through the night.

I remember from high school English classes the term "untrustworthy narrator." I don't think that the narrator of The Order of Things is untrustworthy in any malicious sense; but, like all of us, her view of the story she tells--what is important, the intent behind actions, the way other people worded their statements, even the way in which events unfold--is entirely dependent on her own memory and interpretation of events. In a sense, then, the second narrator in the text is doubly untrustworthy because his recounting of events is streamed through two filters, leaving the reader to determine which bits are "true," which are fabricated, and which have been unintentionally altered in the telling.

The question of what exactly "truth" is might here be appropriate. I'd rather say, though, that while I agree with Hinton's use of first-person narration in this book, I would love to see the story done as a play. A one-act, even, where the audience sees two people who cannot see each other sharing stories through an air vent. Leave the audience to witness both narratives on an equal plane. Omit the inner musings of a single character--rely fully on the dialogue, the setting, the voiceless expressions of the actors to relay the intricate unfoldings of the night.

If anyone wants to take that idea and run with it, feel free. I don't expect credit for it. Just comp tickets to the world premiere, please.

Best Served Cold, by Joe Abercrombie

2010-06-24T11:04:00.003-06:00

My reading accomplishments in the past months reflect the course of my existence in that time.

That is to say, very little reading has been accomplished, because while books can provide the world's best refuge and relaxation, sometimes the constraints on one's time require that more pressing concerns demand what remains of one's time.

Since my last post, I've been a woman with an explosive breast. I've fallen more in love, I've taken on a new job, I've wondered how permanent (or rather, temporary) this shift in work experience will be, and I've moved into a new residence. Dreams have crumbled. Others have taken root. My musical repertoire has expanded, as has my resume of concert attendance. Feelings have been hurt, wounded, damaged, stung, and they have been nurtured, tickled, inspired. I have encountered plenty of opportunities for growth (a term of which I became increasingly fond during the job interview process), and I like to believe I have seized on the best of them.

Sometimes, these weeks have overflown with passion and goodness. At other points, they've been hard as hell.

And at those points, thanks to this book, I can step back and say to myself, "At least I have not watched my brother brutally murdered, been myself thrown down a mountain, transformed into an aching cripple, and become consumed with a driving need for bloody, painful, reckless vengeance."

Always a brighter side, there is.

Farthing, by Jo Walton

2010-04-15T12:19:00.000-06:00

Well, that was faster than expected. I ended up with a lot of time to read yesterday, and more importantly, the desire to do so -- rare enough these past few weeks.
---
Humans, it seems, have a tendency to value the lives of those elevated members of society -- elevated, that is, in perception -- as somehow more valuable than the lives of the common man.

That statement is far too broad and general to be completely accurate, but in essence I believe it to be true. Thousands of people publicly mourned Michael Jackson and Princess Diana and John Lennon, whom most of the mourners had never met, and I would be willing to bet that thousands of them had at some point not attended the funeral or memorial service of people they personally knew.

But the public adoration of the elevated-in-perception gives them immense power and, often enough, a certain immunity. Farthing works with this concept, and while Walton plays particularly on the British obsession with nobility, the phenomenon of letting those we elevate -- whether we like them or not -- get away with murder crosses borders.

Actually, it makes me wonder. If the Bush II administration had wanted to seize complete power of the United States (whether or not they actually wanted to is a whole different topic), would they have had better success if the terrorist plot of 9/11 had succeeded in destroying the White House or the Capitol Building rather than the World Trade Center and part of the Pentagon? Whether the attacks harmed simply the buildings or any members of Congress or the executive branch, would we as a people have felt more symbolically attacked, and therefore more personally wounded, than we were by the very real deaths of those on the jets and in the buildings?

Would the face of one prominent politician or one critically symbolic building, something eminently recognizable to us, have been more effective in allowing the American people to hand over power unquestioningly?

Such a strategy worked in Germany in 1933. Whether or not the NSDAP orchestrated the Reichstag Fire or merely seized the opportunity it presented, Hitler's party was able to seize control of the government democratically and legally without a single German casualty. And in Farthing, something very similar happens in an alternate-world version of Britain. And how is it accomplished? With the murder of a single English politician, an MP in the House of Lords, cleverly framed to incite enough hatred and nationalistic pride to enable a swift parliamentary takeover -- again, completely legal, and quite irrefutable once done.

That's the scary side of humanity that Farthing draws out. Not fascism, or racism, or even the capability of murder, but our ability to allow fear and pride to override pretty much everything else. Our ability to hand over our ideas of decency and equality and liberty for nothing more than perceived protection from a perceived threat. Isn't that handing over what makes us human?

Camp Shakespeare Summer Program

2010-04-13T12:42:00.002-06:00

It might appear that I've not been reading much lately. I have. Just not finishing books.

On my list of conquered texts are a manuscript, A Midsummer Night's Dream (several times more), plenty of write-ups about the health care bill and other political goings-on, a graduate thesis, a professorial keynote address, and lots about by-laws and business licenses and registration policies and such.

That last entry came about because I'm part of a new feature in Albuquerque: Camp Shakespeare. Open to kids ten years of age and older, Camp Shakespeare is a six-week summer program in which we delve into a Shakespeare text and then go through the entire process of putting it on in a real theater environment.

So if you or someone you know is interested in taking part, the information is all at our website. Or contact me directly. I've done courses like this before, just never in the six-week summer format, and I can guarantee that the course will be inspirational, educational, and straight-up fun.

Also, keep posted for the books I'm reading. (Currently, I'm in the middle of three separate volumes. Which are all coming along. I swear.)

Last Night in Twisted River, by John Irving

2010-03-16T10:04:00.000-06:00

Few writers have earned as much of my respect as John Irving. Yet I have never read two of his books consecutively, and until now never any closer than six months apart. So having received two of his novels, Last Night in Twisted River – his newest novel – and The Water-Method Man – published thirty seven years prior – for Christmas, I wanted to undertake an examination of Irving as both a younger writer and as a seasoned author.

Which I did. And there's some of the changes one might expect from the age of the man and the maturation of the wordsmith. There's also much of the same man behind both books.

But approaching this novel with the intent of studying Irving the author, I did not expect it to be a book about writing, which it is – at least in part. One of the main characters becomes a writer (or, Irving might say, is always a writer who finally starts writing), and particularly near the end of the book much is made of Daniel Baciagalupo's writing methods.

I'm not much of one for biographical readings of books. I don't care if anything in any of Irving's books actually “happened” to him. But there's no way one can read his descriptions of Danny's habits without believing that, really, Irving is to a great extent describing himself.

And the writing method fascinates me.

Is a book still fiction if it's heavily based on actual events? Does how much a writer is informed by reality even matter, if the story is well written? Who gives, as the old logger Ketchum would say, a mound of moose shit if a writer bases his characters on people in his life?

Maybe it is a load of Hemingway-dogma to say that a writer writes what she knows. But doesn't a writer have to be influenced by circumstance, by experience, by perception? Even if writers, as Danny (and presumably Irving) believes, are always on the outside looking in, don't they somehow have to be writing either about what's on the inside or how it is to be on the outside?

Why all these questions? Could writing, the need to scribble ideas in a tangible, transferable fashion, simply be a way – flawed or not, successful or not – of making sense of the questions around us? Of addressing the uncertainties that surround us always, and prodding into the certainties?

Why not?

Goalsetting

2010-03-08T11:56:00.000-07:00

Spring is coming -- actually, it's off and on already here -- and with it, I feel the need to clear some space. To de-clutter. To (gasp!) get rid of some books.

Here's the thing: I am completely incapable of selling, or otherwise ridding myself of, my books.

But I have a plan, and with it a resolution of sorts. Sitting on my desk, which doubles as a one-level bookshelf along the back, is a whole heap of books which I have not read, but are also not mine. I'm going to read all of those books -- not necessarily consecutively, seeing as I have plenty of books I DO own that will be interspersed -- before I allow myself to purchase or check out a single volume more.

I don't know if I can do it.

I'm a'gonna try, though. I'm reading John Irving's Last Night in Twisted River right now (an owned book, not a loaned one), but as soon as I finish it -- not long, now that I'm past his substantial exposition -- it's on to the loaners.

Wish me luck.

A Midsummer Night's Dream, by William Shakespeare

2010-03-03T14:39:00.000-07:00

Once again -- and this is going to become a familiar refrain -- I'm involved in the theater. Only this time, I'm (probably) not on stage.

A common comment from friends and acquaintances who attended Twelfth Night was that we did a great job with the production, but they wished that the language could have been modernized. Certainly, Shakespeare's words were easier to understand in performance than in writing... but they felt it lost (or they missed) something because of the language's antiquity.

For people who struggle with Shakespearean English, these books are great dual-language editions. They're the texts we use with the children who will be performing A Midsummer Night's Dream in May. But -- and this is a big but -- the kiddos don't perform the "modern" English version. They perform it Shakespearean-style.

And there's not much more impressive than a little kid reading, understanding, and then performing a piece of Shakespearean dialogue.

I completely understand those people who say that Shakespeare, even on stage, is sometimes difficult to understand. Heck, I agree with them. But anything literary -- and I'm including film and television here -- is most rewarding for everyone involved when it takes a little extra concentration and a little extra effort to comprehend it. When it rewards the reader or viewer for paying attention earlier on, whether it was three acts or three hundred pages or thirteen episodes ago. When it doesn't assume the lowest common denominator.

And to anyone who finds Shakespeare incomprehensible -- I've done it before, and I'll do it again -- I point at these amazing students and say, "They can do it."

Eating Animals, by Jonathan Safran Foer

2010-02-23T16:48:00.003-07:00

I have always been an avid omnivore. Nothing against vegetarians, or vegans, or anyone with dietary choices different than mine. But I never thought I would even consider cutting meat from my personal menu options.

Which is why this book, which I bought blindly without reading so much as a dust jacket blurb, frightened me. It was nothing like Foer's other books, both excellent novels. No, this book sat threateningly on my shelf for weeks because it had presented me with a choice: Remain largely ignorant about the meat industry in America, or risk having to change my gastronomic lifestyle.

Foer doesn't proselytize the vegetarian cause, although it's clear throughout the book what his own personal stance and choices are. But he does discuss his findings after years of research and industry infiltration. And he comes to the conclusion in his book, as in his personal life, that eating meat -- which, in this country, almost inevitably means eating factory-farmed meat -- is not the right thing to do for a whole slew of reasons.

But is what is right for Foer necessarily right for anyone else? I do know that, having finished this book, I cannot eat meat with the same zeal, nor (if I'm honest) the same indifference, that I did a week ago. And it's not just because the cute little animals have to be killed for me to enjoy eating them. If I may quote from near the end of Eating Animals, Foer writes:

"For some, the decision to eschew factory-farmed products will be easy. For others, the decision will be a hard one. To those for whom it sounds like a hard decision (I would have counted myself in this group), the ultimate question is whether it is worth the inconvenience. We know, at least, that this decision will help prevent deforestation, curb global warming, reduce pollution, save oil reserves, lessen the burden on rural America, decrease human rights abuses, improve public health, and help eliminate the most systematic animal abuse in world history. What we don't know, though, may be just as important. How would making such a decision change us?"

Or, what to me is the obvious question: How would not making such a decision change us? Change me?

Perhaps I am weak. I see how vegetarians force their generous hosts to prepare "specialty" meals, not usually by demanding vegetarian fare, but because those serving food feel an obligation to accommodate that person's dietary choices. Or, I watch as vegetarians have to go without eating in a social setting because there is no vegetarian option. And I don't want to be in either of those positions.

In my own kitchen? No problem. Except that those with whom I live are omnivores, and I couldn't expect them to alter their dietary habits to match mine.

Basically, it's societal eating that is keeping me from turning vegetarian right now. Which makes some sense; eating is, and for humans always has been, a social activity. But for me, the question has become whether that influence is enough to prevent me from changing my dietary habits across the board in a way that now seems fit.

If I do choose to become vegetarian, am I likely to give up meat forever? No. I think that, if I could be absolutely certain about certain qualities of the animals -- essentially, are they free of all the detrimental treatments and attitudes that define factory farms and their practices -- I would eat them. But not as regularly. And certainly never again so casually.

The Water-Method Man, by John Irving

2010-02-15T13:43:00.001-07:00

This blog post frustrated me. I struggled with it -- with sitting down to write it, with knowing what to write -- despite simply loving the book. It was maybe the funniest Irving I've ever read, eminently enjoyable, with a cast of hilariously messed-up and untrustworthy characters.

But I couldn't write about it.

Then, yesterday, I had a singular experience. The moment itself had nothing particularly outrageous or unexpected, but it belongs to that limited category of times in life when everything takes on a new perspective. When something familiar is translated into new terms. When new lenses make the pictures pop out in full 3-D perspective.

And maybe the moment was a little cliché. But just as clichés are not necessarily invalid, this moment was perhaps all the more valuable for it.

Riding on a train from Santa Fe to Bernalillo, overnight bags on the seats opposite, by-then-lukewarm tea in paper cups, darkness having descended outside, head resting on a scented shoulder, hearing the first chapter of this book read aloud to me, the story was interrupted only by her shocked and delightful laughter.

John Irving is a part of who I am as a person and, to a much greater extent, a writer. I don't know if it was realized or not, but a part of me was shared on that train ride through the empty land north of Albuquerque.

And that's what books are all about. Not the characters, not what makes a story good or enjoyable (or bad and miserable), but about sharing pieces of ourselves. About bringing people closer.

Not bad for what's so often -- and maybe should be less frequently so -- a solitary activity.

Everything Matters!, by Ron Currie, Jr.

2010-01-11T15:37:00.000-07:00

The central theme of Everything Matters! is not a new one. It's a concept that has concerned philosophers, theologians, normal people for... well, ever. It's the reason the idea of an afterlife is so appealing, and why a day of judgment in some form is part of so many religions.

The idea: Does what we do on this earth actually matter?

But Currie takes this idea a step further: Would what we do matter at all if we knew the world were going to end, not just someday, but at a given point in our lifetimes?

I may have some grand ideas from time to time on this blog, but even I know better than to tackle that topic head-on. Of course I think what we do matters -- and even if there is some afterlife or a being that will judge us for our actions in this life, that's not why it matters. It's why I'm largely a Vonnegutian humanist -- we have no way of knowing what lies beyond this life, and without religion in the picture it's quite reasonably nothing. But we do have this time, and with that we ought to do what we can to make it the best it can be for as many people as possible.

Without asking Mr. Currie directly, clearly I can't know his personal stance on the matter. But from my reading of this book, and hell, from the title of the book, I have to think he probably agrees with me to a point. What matters in this life isn't -- and shouldn't -- be based on some larger purpose, some hope of eternal reward, even the idea that what we do will affect the rest of the universe. It may be that in the grand scheme, what we do is utterly meaningless. But despite our reaching for the stars, whether or not we are part of some grand scheme, we are without doubt part of some small scheme. And what we do within the sphere of our existence certainly matters.
---
Also, I am convinced that Currie must be a Kansas City Royals fan. Or, he was just very good at giving the Royals their due for the one decade they deserved it. Either way: Woo!

Twelfth Night, by William Shakespeare

2010-01-06T18:40:00.000-07:00

This play is just fun. To those of you who complained about having to read Shakespeare in high school (of which I was one): You probably only had issues with the plays because you only had to read them once. Like all the Bard's works, this one gets better with each subsequent reading.

I should know. I've now had to read it something like 187 times.

Because I'm acting in it.

That's right. Under my nom de théâtre, I will be making my actorial debut as Duke Orsino in Twelfth Night, directed by the fabulous Jonatha Kottler, running at the Adobe Theater in Albuquerque, New Mexico, from January 15 through February 7.

This production has eaten my life.

And it is one of the most fun things I have ever done.

So if you're in the vicinity of Albuquerque in the next month, please, come support this incarnation of local theater with an absolutely delightful cast -- I'm not just saying that because I'm part of it -- and say hi after the show. I'll probably write something here about the experience, being so literary and all, during or after the run, when I feel I can properly process and evaluate it.
---
Update: We have a poster and everything! Look!