Byzantium's Shores: chronicling the misadventures of an overalls-clad hippie

Wolfgang at 256

2012-01-27T06:46:00.001-05:00

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was born this day, in 1756. His thirty-five years encompassed one of the finest creative lives in the history of our species. Mozart forever!

Something for Thursday

2012-01-26T07:43:00.003-05:00

I'm feeling like some Wagner, so here's some Wagner. The Prelude from Lohengrin.

Everybody's starving, and those shifty Wilder boys are feasting on pancakes?!

2012-01-25T20:32:00.001-05:00

After reading a wonderful book called The Wilder Life: My Adventures in the Lost World of Little House on the Prairie by Wendy McClure, I feel the need to make a literary confession: I've never finished reading the Little House on the Prairie books. For me, fourth grade was the Laura Ingalls Wilder year. After that, it was pretty much over, aside from reruns of the Little House on the Prairie teevee show.

My teacher that year, Mrs. Pies, decided that the Little House books would comprise our "reading aloud" activity for the entire year, where each day she would read a bit of one of the books to us, for maybe twenty minutes to half an hour. We did the books in order, starting with Little House in the Big Woods and getting as far as By the Shores of Silver Lake. Over the next summer I read The Long Winter, and then...well, I started Little Town on the Prairie, but by then, I think I'd petered out.

There'd been a kind of communal experiencing of the books, my classmates and I, as Mrs. Pies read them aloud, and yeah, I liked The Long Winter. But my enthusiasm was flagging by then, we'd moved across the country so I'd never be able to discuss any of that stuff with those kids again, I was discovering fantasy by way of Lloyd Alexander. I have never gone back and finished the series; nor have I re-read them, even. I don't really remember a whole lot about the books. I remember the teevee show somewhat better, since that aired in reruns every day after school, and I knew enough to note the differences between the show and the books (where the heck did adopted son Albert come from?!).

My memories of the books, then, are a bit on the vague side. For instance, I remember being rather baffled by Farmer Boy -- after two books with Laura and Mary and Pa and Ma and company, what the heck were we doing talking about some kid named Almanzo? What was with that highly odd bit about the bullies in the one-room schoolhouse who had literally beaten the last teacher to death, and their defeat by a guy who'd borrowed father's bullwhip? And the long lecture Almanzo received when he asked his father for a penny or something so he could buy a lemonade, a request that resulted in a lecture on the Sanctity of Work and Almanzo's gift of a silver dollar and his decision to go buy himself a "good suckling pig"? That whole book just seemed strange.

(Here's something odd that's stuck in my mind for thirty-plus years: the "Almanzo gets a lecture on work" chapter wasn't read by Mrs. Pies, but by a substitute who was an older lady with a gravely, two-packs-a-day voice who tended to speak really loudly. I remember when she got to the end of that chapter, when Almanzo says, "I'm going to buy a good suckling pig!", this teacher read that last sentence in a Very. Loud. Staccato. Delivery! Before she slapped the book down on the desk. Really weird.)

And then there was the transition from On the Banks of Plum Creek to By the Shores of Silver Lake. The previous book had ended on a typically plucky and upbeat note, but Silver Lake starts off, basically, with "Mary had gone blind and the family had to move. And on the day they moved, Laura went out to get the dog but found him dead." Yeesh! But Mary was really a goody-two-shoes, wasn't she? I remember one incident (don't recall which book) in which Ma suggests that the girls put away something they've been looking forward to having – not sure what it was – and Mary says something along the lines of, "Yes, we should put it away, Laura. It will help us to learn self-denial." Yeesh, again. Self-denial? Sign me up!

The book I remember best is The Long Winter, which is probably because it's the one I read myself. The fact that I remember it as well as I do probably indicates something positive about Wilder's writing, since, as I noted above, I've never re-read it. But I recall the book opening on a very hot day, with Laura taking sugar water out to Pa in the fields; I remember the Indian who gives the town the warning about the coming winter (and Ma's reaction, "Indian? What Indian?!" to which Wilder notes, "Ma despised Indians"). I remember Almanzo and his brother hiding their seed wheat from the starving town, and his reasons for doing so (for which he gets atonement anyway when he ventures out with a friend into danger to try and find a farmer who had a good wheat crop). And so on and so forth. But after that book, I'm sorry to say that I honestly lost interest in the ongoing adventures and fates of the Ingallses and the Wilders. Not even the fact that by this time we were living in Allegany, NY – just fifteen miles or so down the road from Cuba, NY, birthplace of Charles Ingalls – could rekindle my interest. I guess I'd moved on. I had new friends, new places to explore, and that same summer I'd discovered Lloyd Alexander, and with him, epic fantasy. (Not that I was done with Kid-Lit Westerns: a year later I'd be introduced to John D. Fitzgerald and The Great Brain. Now those, I read in their entirety.)

So anyway, I didn't have much of a "Wilder Life". Not so Wendy McClure, who has been a big fan of the books for all her life, and who decided to make a series of pilgrimages to the actual, physical sites in which the books took place: her "Laura experience", as it were. McClure travels all over the mid-United States, seeking out what evidence is left in various locales from the books that the iconic literary events happened there. Thus she travels to Pepin, WI, to seek out the Big Woods (which, after I look at the map, I realize were located not far from La Crosse, which is where we lived when I was in kindergarten). She travels to Plum Creek, where she takes off her shoes and goes wading. She goes to De Smet, South Dakota – the Little Town on the Prairie – and to nearly every other location of significance in the life of Laura Ingalls Wilder.

Each time she goes to one of these places, McClure seems a bit disappointed...or maybe that's not the right word. But the tangible connection to the books and to Laura Ingalls Wilder herself eludes McClure, for the most part, and instead she finds herself interacting with people who love the books or the "Little House" phenomenon but not in the same way. There are fundamentalist Christians who believe that we are living in the End Times and who think the "Little House" books serve as a good functional blueprint for the way Christians are supposed to live; there are other families who are far more well-versed in the teevee show than in the books themselves. (Reading about folks like this, one wonders if they are surprised to learn that the citizens of Walnut Grove actually didn't dynamite their town.)

I was interested to read about McClure's uneasy relationship with Farmer Boy, the book in which the Ingallses disappear so we can learn about Almanzo Wilder's youth. Even in fourth grade, Farmer Boy seemed like a 'weird cousin' of a book, and thinking back, I do realize that McClure's main complaint – that everything in the book turns out well for the Wilder family and they pretty much fail at nothing – is not without merit. McClure posits that Farmer Boy was Laura Ingalls Wilder's own idealization of the world of her youth, just as for many today, the "Little House" books themselves are the same thing. They certainly are for McClure, who goes to great lengths to experience what Laura experienced. All the way to churning her own butter, which she describes thusly:

I would come to learn several things about buying a butter churn on eBay:

1. Most of the churns are not actually for churning. I'd thought I was in luck when I saw dozens of listings for charming wooden churns come up on the Search Results page. That was before I realized they were all four inches high and used to hold toothpicks. It turns out that on eBay, churns are far more common as an empty signifier than as signified object, with an alarming number of churn-shaped things used to hold plants, cookies, paper towels, and toilet paper. The idea that you might actually want an old-fashioned churn to do the task for which it was named starts to seem kind of strange.

2. Newer dash churns seem to exist, but nobody wants to admit it. Apparently every dash churn is an antique, even when it's listed as 'never used'. How is this possible? Was churn hoarding a popular hobby back in the day? Maybe people received multiple churns as wedding presents and just stuck the extra in closets, the way we do today with stick blenders? It's a mystery!

3. When talking to friends about buying a dash churn, one must be careful when making hand gestures. Do not simulate holding the dash in your hands and pumping it up and down, lest it appear you are talking about hand jobs. (Let's not talk about how I learned this lesson.)

4. The cost of shipping and handling for a dash churn with two-gallon stoneware crock will surprise you. I think it was enough to pay for one of Mary's semesters at Iowa College for the Blind.

You have to admire that level of dedication to finding out what things were like in the Big Woods and on the Prairie. I can honestly say that I have never felt the slightest inclination to churn my own butter.

Reading McClure's book fills in some of the blanks for me, as far as Laura Ingalls Wilder's life goes. It's interesting to read about the things she left out of the books, and the ways she 'corrected' the chronologies so as to make for better novels. I was actually surprised to learn that there actually was a baby Charles, in between Carrie and Grace, who died in infancy; I always figured that the teevee show made that up in order to give Laura a chance to blame herself and run away from home so she could find the highest mountain in the area in order to get closer to God so she could bargain for her baby brother's return but to find guidance from a guy who looks suspiciously like Ernest Borgnine but who may actually be an angel. (Whew. I'm not making that up – and seriously, if you want to watch something that will jerk your tears and jerk them hard, get a hold of that two-part episode. Boy Howdy. It's one of those things that can make me tear up if I just think about it enough.)

I know that as a kid, we stopped by one or more of the various Little House sites on our trips across the country, but my memories of these are very vague. No, I never had much of a "Wilder Life", and the Little House books are, for me, books I read and not a whole lot more. They're in the backdrop of my literary life, but not a major part of it. I'm glad to have read McClure's book, though; reading about someone's enthusiastic passion is always a joy, no matter whether the passion is shared, as long as the book is well-written. And this one is. Long Live Laura!

A Random Wednesday Conversation Starter

2012-01-25T07:44:00.002-05:00

Assuming that you have not visited all 48 of the 'lower' or 'Continiguous' states, of the ones you haven't visited, which one would you most like to see and why? (I specify the 'lower 48' because Hawaii and Alaska are too obvious. Everybody wants to see those!)

A Pile of Doorstops?

2012-01-24T00:30:00.000-05:00

So this year I'm re-reading all of George RR Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire (which, when I piled all the books in my arms, I realized should be retitled A Dirge of Back Pain and Eye Strain). I've been meaning to do this for a while, and I figure with A Dance with Dragons sitting on my shelf still un-read, it's time to take the whole series on again. A big reason for this is the long time it took Martin to get this last book out; it's been so long that I simply don't remember a lot of the finer details of the series, so I think I might miss out on something if I don't do the refresher work. I remember reading A Game of Thrones for the first time way back when we'd first moved into our very first apartment in Buffalo, which would have been late 2000, so it's nearly twelve years since I read that one; a similar period. Wow, this series has been going on for a long time!

I'm reading Game of Thrones right now, actually, and just last night passed the halfway mark. As readable as these books are -- the first two, at least -- they're so long that reaching halfway feels like an accomplishment. These are the kinds of books where you sit down, read fifty or sixty pages, and not really feel all that much closer to the end. It takes a lot of reading before the part of the book in my right hand starts to feel noticeably smaller, you know?

I will, of course, post thoughts on each book as I finish them. It's interesting to me right now, though, that my favorite characters are still my favorite characters, and also that a few characters I didn't like so much the first time through are more palatable now, which I suppose is partly because I have some idea of where their respective stories are going. I'm also keenly interested to see how my impressions of the books stand up: my recollection is that there is a distinct diminishing of returns with each successive novel; Game is great, Clash is really good, Storm starts to verge on the reading equivalent of sensory overload, and Feast is pretty much of a slog. Is this the way of it? We'll find out!

Oh, and I'm not re-reading all this straight through. No, I'll be alternating these books with something else each time. I really don't want to spend that long of an uninterrupted time in Westeros. That way, madness lies! But anyway, that's what's happening. Winter is coming; dark wings, dark words; A Lannister always pays his debts; yada yada yada!

My retail heaven!

2012-01-23T18:18:00.001-05:00

Rip-Proof Overalls in Colfax, WA, originally uploaded by pasa47.

A bookstore? Overalls? In the same place?! Oh that I have not been given leave to live in such a Shangri-la!

2012 Classics Challenge: "Heart of Darkness"

2012-01-23T10:30:00.000-05:00

I'm actually doing a reading challenge in 2012, called the "Classics Challenge", and hosted by the blog November's Autumn. The idea is to read seven works of classic literature, of which only two can be re-reads. (You can peruse my list of books here.) Then, on the fourth of every month, November's Autumn will post a series of prompt questions (first month here) to encourage people to post about their books.

(Side note: I'm seeing a lot of 'challenges' like this around Blogistan suddenly. Maybe next year I'll host one – a F&SF reading challenge, maybe? Something to think about...and I've got time!)

So, I decided to start my reading with Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness. Why this one? Well, among other things...it's short. I chose a mixture of book lengths for my list; there are a couple of short works mixed amongst a couple of doorstops. But why did I choose Heart of Darkness for my list, to begin with? Well...uhh...here's an embarrassing admission.

I thought I was choosing a different book.

I actually wanted to read that book where a bunch of kids end up stranded out in a jungle or someplace in the wild, and lacking adult supervision, they end up forming a kind of savage society. And I knew that Heart of Darkness dealt with folks who revert to savagery when they spend time in remote wilderness, so I briefly thought that they were the same book. I started Heart of Darkness on New Year's Day, and got about twenty pages into it before I realized that what I'd really intended to read was Lord of the Flies by William Golding.

Oh well. I was twenty pages into a short (93 pages) novel, so I wasn't going to stop. Heart of Darkness it was.

And I finished it three days later. One book down, six to go, and I'm only four days into the new year as I write this! Huzzah!!

So anyway, on to Heart of Darkness.

Joseph Conrad lived from 1857 to 1924 and wrote in English, despite the fact that he was a native of the Polish Ukraine and did not speak English until his twenties. Looking into Conrad's life, I was confused by this – but the history of the national borders of Europe is a messy one. The city of Conrad's birth is in the present-day Ukraine, but apparently at the time it was considered a part of Poland.

From what I read, Conrad tends to write his stories and novels in nautical settings, and Heart of Darkness is nautical as well, although the chief motif is not the sea but rather the river as seen from the sea, as a pathway leading inland, into a heart or sorts. Heart of Darkness tells a fairly simple story, plot-wise; four men wait on a boat at the mouth of the Thames for the turning of the tide, so they can sail back upriver. While they wait, they listen to one of their number, a man named Marlow, tell about another time he had to sail upriver: years before when he had been contracted by a Belgian trading company to go up a river into the heart of the Congo in search of another company representative, a man named Kurtz, from whom little has been heard.

Marlow's story is grim. He tells of the travails of getting a boat up that river, whilst contending with the savagery of the local population, savagery which it later turns out has been joined by Kurtz himself. Marlow encounters severe mechanical troubles, uncooperative trade company representatives, attacks by the locals, and the like until he finally reaches Kurtz, finding the man in failing health living in a camp surrounded literally by heads on spikes. Kurtz dies on the way back down the river, and Marlow must journey back to England and tell Kurtz's fiancee what has happened. She demands to know Kurtz's last words, and even though they were "The horror! The horror!", Marlow tells her that her name was the last thing he pronounced.

Heart of Darkness, for all its brevity, was a fairly tough slog. It consists of long, dense paragraphs of description of a dark, dank, muddy, hot place that is unpleasant in nearly all its particulars, and the small cast of characters consists of a largely unsavory lot. There really doesn't seem to be any mystery as to why Kurtz regressed to savagery; Conrad's answer seems to be that it is inevitable when one is so solidly sequestered in a place as dark, as grim, as the Congo. I found it difficult reading a book that treats the aboriginal peoples of Africa as nothing more than savages whose only function, storywise, is to provide a contrast to the civilized whites and illustrate the depths to which they can descend.

However, I'm not entirely sure that Conrad totally intended this. As the book closes, Marlow comments that the mouth of the Thames also seems to lead into a heart of darkness. So on the one hand, perhaps his racism is partly forgivable given the time in which he wrote; on the other, perhaps he doesn't see savagery as inherent in certain peoples of Africa but as something that lurks within all people. Certainly Marlow seems wary of the darkness that lies within his own country, and the darkness that he mind find there, lurking within his own heart.

One other thing I plan to do during this Challenge in 2012 is check out filmed adaptations of the books I read (inasmuch as I can find relevant ones). The go-to film for Heart of Darkness is Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now, which transports the book to the Viet Nam war. I'll be posting about that something later this month (or early next).

I close with a quote:

Droll thing life it – that mysterious arrangement of merciless logic for a futile purpose. The most you can hope from it is some knowledge of yourself – that comes too late – a crop of unextinguishable regrets. I have wrestled with death. It is the most unexciting contest you can imagine. It takes place in an impalpable greyness, with nothing underfoot, with nothing around, without spectators, without clamour, without glory, without the great desire of victory, without the great fear of defeat, in a sickly atmosphere of tepid scepticism, without much belief in your own right, and still less in that of your adversary. If such is the form of ultimate wisdom, then life is a greater riddle than some of us think it to be. I was within a hair's breadth of the last opportunity for pronouncement, and I found with humiliation that probably I would have nothing to say. This is the reason why I affirm that Kurtz was a remarkable man. He had something to say. He said it. Since I had peeped over the edge myself, I understand better the meaning of his stare, that could not see the flame of the candle, but was wide enough to penetrate all the hearts that beat in the darkness.

Images via.

My next book in the 2012 Classics Challenge is The Arabian Nights.

Sentential Links

2012-01-23T00:30:00.000-05:00

We'll have some linkage...but first, here's Peter Dinklage!

OK, now the linkage!

:: The road to hell might be paved with good intentions, but the traffic on that road is governed by the law of unintended consequences. (I know, SOPA is going nowhere, but this is still an excellent post on the subject.)

:: You won’t hear me saying this much, but I agree with Santorum. (I do, too. What's the world coming to!)

:: Etta James is most often associated with the song "At Last," which has become a standard at weddings and was so memorably significant at President Obama's inaugural ball, and for that record's sound, she is often thought of as a jazz singer. But she was far more than that. In her time, she performed pop standards, traditional blues, '60s soul, and even a cover of Guns 'n' Roses' "Welcome to the Jungle" on her final album. It is her work from the '50s and '60s that I enjoy most, though. Like so much from that era, it's just plain good music. As I said, it makes me happy for no reason... and need we ask anything more of our music?

:: It’s very simple. If a woman acts like they’re your friend, says they’re your friend, and behave like they’re your friend…then they’re your friend. This doesn’t mean you can’t want more, but their emotional consistency is not a personal slight against you. Suck it up, deal with it…and that doesn’t mean stop being their friend. What nine out of ten Nice Guys need is a female friend that they know they have no chance with, just so they can figure out that it’s not the end of the world if you hang out with a woman just because you enjoy each other’s company and not as some sort of secretive platonic dating gambit.

:: Romney has a problem: People don't like him. Not only that, but the more people see him, the more they dislike him. The panel on MSNBC was particularly keen on pointing out, as the results came in, that Newt Gingrich's unfavorability ratings in this country at large are whopping, and indeed they are. But Willard's unlikability is of a different sort. It is chronic and general. Gingrich, at least, for the several moments when he goes into highest dudgeon and starts raving about "elites" and Saul Alinsky, can give you a few seconds of pure entertainment for which you might briefly wish to thank him.

:: One thing I think everyone can agree on is that Velveeta considered to be the equivalent of Satanism. The antithesis of cheese, yet a cheese in and of itself, worshipped only by those who rebuke the whole concept of flavor itself. Hail Velveeta, the eternal and undying one! (The Wife makes a chicken casserole in which Velveeta is a prominent ingredient. I actually like the casserole...but Ye Gods, Velveeta is not cheese.)

:: Love them or hate them, the Star Wars prequels will not being going anywhere anytime soon. (You bet your ass, they aren't!)

More next week!

Sunday Burst of Weird and Awesome

2012-01-22T15:23:00.001-05:00

Oddities and Awesome abound!!!

:: Seventy-five years ago, a whole bunch of special beer was brewed in Britain on the occasion of the coronation of King Edward VII. But that coronation never took place, because the King abdicated so he could marry the woman he loved (thus bringing a stutterer to the throne...note to self: write blog post about The King's Speech). So the beer was left in a cellar and forgotten...until now.

:: In Siberia, a diesel truck ended up in a river. The river was deep enough to completely submerge pretty much the entire truck except for the cab and the engine compartment. The truck won.

One of the YouTube comments dubs the truck "Truck Norris". I find it hard to disagree.

:: Nick Mamatas doesn't think too highly of some common bits of writing advice. I tend to pretty much ignore all of it myself, by this point, and simply try to do the very best that I can on the story that I want to tell. Of course, I'm still an unpublished schlub, so who cares what I think, right?

More next week!

All Things Pie

2012-01-22T15:10:00.000-05:00

Pie on the brain lately!

:: Beth Howard, who has become one of my favorite bloggers, has been working on a book called Making Piece, which is about how she dealt with awful grief (her husband passed away suddenly at a terribly young age) by, among other things, throwing herself into pie-baking and from there to pie evangelism. Her book is now available for pre-order. I'll definitely be getting a copy. I've found that learning new things, and becoming a bit obsessive about them, is a good way to (at least partially) deal with grief.

:: On the making of pie...I do love a good pot pie, although I hadn't made one in quite a long time until last week, when I did what pot pies are for and made one as a way to use up some leftover meats. In this case I used leftover ham from New Year's and leftover smoked beef sausage. The result was like this:

I thickened some beef broth with a roux and added some onion and sauteed mushrooms, in addition to the meats. The crust? Well...I really need to start making my own. This was a store-bought crust, one of those ones you unroll. The resulting pie was tasty, but a bit on the salty side. I'll be revisiting the pot pie concept again soon, though -- next week I intend to make some pulled pork, which I think would make an interesting pot pie!

Part of my problem with making pie crust is that we only really have one spot in the kitchen area suitable to the rolling out of a dough, and that's our dining room table, which isn't always free of obstruction. (Translation: we tend to pile an awful lot of clutter on our table.) Not that clearing the table takes very long, but it's just a whole extra step, you know?

:: Speaking of baking pie, I wonder if this gizmo, which Roger Green e-mailed to me, actually works? It seems...well, it seems odd. Why not just bake two pies? How strange!

:: My favorite pie for eating has always been apple, which cries out for a scoop of vanilla bean ice cream and some caramel sauce drizzled on top:

I just can't get behind that whole "cheddar cheese on apple pie" thing, though. Cheddar cheese and sliced raw apples are great together, but...I can't make the leap from there to cheese-on-apple-pie. Sorry!

:: Roger also e-mailed me a while back a couple of posts by Mark Evanier, on the subject of pies as comedic props (i.e., pies for forceful application to people's faces). It makes for interesting reading, as Evanier spells out some techniques (here and here) for what he considers 'proper' pie-throwing. Basically he says that pies for throwing should consist of a crust outside of the tin or pan, filled with shaving cream. I suppose he may have a point, if your pie-throwing is part of some kind of performed skit of stage show or something like that. Quick clean-up and the lack of any souring-milk aromas are certainly desirable factors. But as for myself, well...I'm not a stage actor, and I sure don't want to get hit with something that tastes like soap because it basically is soap! Nope, if it's going in my face, I want the real thing.

:: Finally, some funny behind-the-scenes photos. Here's Natalie Wood on the set of The Great Race, whilst shooting that film's pie fight:

(EDIT: I couldn't remember where I got that photo from...but now I do. And contrary to Mr. Evanier, it turns out that all those pies in that pie fight were real! No shaving cream at all!

And here is actress Mia Sara, on the set of Ferris Bueller's Day Off. For some reason she's getting pied. No idea why.

That about covers it. Pie is awesome!

'We can't repel odor of that magnitude!'

2012-01-21T10:49:00.000-05:00

I'm really glad I wasn't drinking coffee yet this morning when George Takei posted this on Facebook, because I would likely have spit the coffee out all over the place.

Well, folks, with my embrace of poop jokes, I can safely say that this blog's journey towards the Dark Side may be complete!

Saturday Centus - The Return!

2012-01-21T10:34:00.002-05:00

OK, folks, we're now far enough into January that life is settling back down in a quasi-normal kind of thing. The Holiday season just past was a wonderful one, but it was also abnormally busy, even by my standards -- the Holidays are always busy, but this time it was "Wow, what a whirlwind!" I eventually just had to put some things on the back burner, such as regular features of this blog -- the Centus among them. Well, now I'm ready to jump back in again, so here we go...only, this week's prompt assumes that I've done the last two prompts. This, therefore, means that I need to resort to trickery and skulduggery. In short...I am going to cheat, and do all three prompts in one.

Prompt the first was to write a cliffhanger; prompt the second was to resolve it; prompt the third is to give it an epilogue. OK? OK! So, I now offer a haiku. Line one is the cliffhanger, line two is the resolution, and line three, the epilogue.

Will he or won’t he?
He thinks and chooses, “I will!”
And therefore, he did.

A belated Happy New Year to all Centusians, and it's good to see you all again!

Onward and Upward!

2012-01-20T21:02:00.001-05:00

Onward and Upward!, originally uploaded by Jaquandor.

I haven't updated my progress on Princesses In SPACE!!! (not the actual title) in a while, so here's where things stand. In the two months since my last word count update here, I've produced an additional 21,000 words, which is a nice total. That's a bit off the pace of 500 words a day that I've been trying to maintain, but there were extenuating circumstances. (Sigh...aren't there always?)

First, of course, the last update came a couple weeks before Thanksgiving, so I had to get through the Holiday season, with all its distractions and demands on time, which all conspired to produce more days where I didn't produce a single word than I would have liked.

More demanding, however, was my realization a few weeks back that I needed to do some backtracking. I don't like to backtrack or edit as I go; it's my firm belief that "This way, madness lies". I'm the kind of person who can get totally bogged down in my own editing, and I could lose myself in trying to make fifty or a hundred pages totally perfect in favor of getting the story told. And even with this bit of revision work, I really had to discipline myself to not get sucked into too much sentence-fixing.

So why the revision? As I noted at the time, I came to realize that a part of my backstory wasn't as solid as it could have been, which meant that there were times when certain characters' actions felt forced and contrived instead of something a person might actually do in that particular circumstance. So I had to suspend "forward progress" and retreat a bit into the narrative, doing some fixing work and strengthening some things and removing others.

Now, there are things that I know will have to be changed when I go back and do the real editing, and in most cases I just make a notation in a file I helpfully call "Notations for editing", to which I will refer when I go back to fix things. In a lot of cases I can just set the changes in my mind and write from a certain point as if the changes are in effect. But this time, the changes were too involved to do that. I had to backtrack.

And now I'm done backtracking, with the helpful side effect that this work has helped the rest of the story crystallize in my brain a bit. That's a very welcome development!

So at this point, I'm just about ready to start the final third of the book. Allegiances are revealed! Traitors are unmasked! Loves are declared! Spaceships are flown! Princesses are rescued and do some rescuing! And the Universe will never be the same! Until next time...Excelsior!!!

(So, how was my Stan Lee impersonation?)

Teevee Notes

2012-01-19T21:21:00.002-05:00

Some random thoughts on teevee:

:: I just post this on Facebook:

Some of you might be tempted to dismiss the new Rob Schneider sitcom as total crap that appeals to the lowest denominator. Some of you might just assume, without watching it, that it's a typically awful sitcom with cookie-cutter plots, ethnic stereotypes substituted for wit, and shrill characters who think that you overcome an awful punchline by shouting it. Some of you might assume these things...and you'd all be right!

Seriously, this show is bad.

:: The last couple episodes of Big Bang Theory have really brought the funny. Here's my current working hypothesis on Sheldon Cooper: what makes him a great character isn't just his neuroses that allow him to clash with other characters over anything at all. It's that sometimes he's right, and the social conventions he genuinely doesn't understand really are pretty goofy, when you think of it.

:: Oh, Castle...you know I love you. Really. But the "Beckett's mother" thing really needs to end, and I'm starting to worry that instead of moving things toward conclusion, you're ratcheting it up...and that's not good. Now we have Castle having shadowy meetings in parking garages with unnamed contacts whose allegiances we don't know? And that this guy is manipulating things so that Castle will remain able to assist the NYPD and thus protect Beckett? Geez. I just don't know about this...especially since it's obviously being set up so that at some point Castle will have to steer Beckett in the wrong direction, thus driving another wedge between them. Be careful here, Castle. You can do this well...but even the greatest players drop the ball once in a while.

:: The recent dearth of new episodes of House is getting annoying.

:: A few weeks back, GLEE did a song called "Red Solo Cup", which is a country song by Toby Keith. If you haven't heard this song, I suppose it's worth a listen as what it is: a mildly-amusing novelty song. Second time, though, it stinks. What does this have to do with GLEE? Not much, except it's a terrible show. Moving on:

:: I kind of like The Finder.

:: Shows I'm sitting on until a time when there aren't new episodes of anything: Once Upon a Time and Alcatraz.

That's about it for now....

Something for Thursday

2012-01-19T00:30:00.000-05:00

I've been watching Carl Sagan's Cosmos series lately (one episode a week, usually on Sundays -- I'm up to Episode 6, 'Travelers' Tales'), and as always, I'm enchanted by the music of the series. Here is one of my favorite selections from the show, "Entends-tu les chiens aboyer?" by Vangelis.

Stop SOPA

2012-01-18T06:26:00.005-05:00

Would I be able to write this blog in a world where the Internet is governed by SOPA? I honestly don't know. I strongly suspect that I would, but it would be a lot less interesting. I also strongly suspect that a good many posts here wouldn't be possible, and that a good many things I've done in this space would result in this blog being 'blacked out' because of dreaded 'piracy'.

Stop this bill. The Web is too important to be hobbled in this way. We've already burned the Library of Alexandria once. Let's not do anything like that again!

Why cats will never rule the world

2012-01-17T21:46:00.001-05:00

Lazy bums. All of 'em., originally uploaded by Jaquandor.

Not that I disagree entirely with their approach to things....

A lifetime of sitting in the dark

2012-01-17T00:30:00.000-05:00

I was nine years old, and I wandered into the living room to find my mother watching some show on PBS. It was a show about movies – there would be a clip of a new movie that was out, and these two guys would then talk a bit about whether the movie was any good or not. One of these guys was a thin, lanky guy. The other was a squat, fat guy. The thin guy was named Gene. The fat guy was named Roger.

"What's this?" I asked.

"It's called Sneak Previews," my mother answered. "Those two men are film critics. They tell us if movies are good or not."

"Oh."

And I watched the thing. I didn't know anything about movies, but these two guys were interesting to watch. Another year or two later, their show was off PBS, which struck me as a bummer...but they turned up again, in a syndicated show that was on, like many syndicated shows, at whatever time some station or other felt like putting it on. No matter, it was fun seeing these two guys, Gene and Roger – who worked for newspapers in Chicago – talk about movies.

So I watched Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert for years, off and on, right up until Siskel's deeply saddening death in 1998. Then I watched Ebert and Richard Roeper (a good enough fellow, but no substitute for Siskel) for a few more years, until we no longer had cable and thus the show was beyond my grasp. And then, a few years after that, Ebert himself started to have health issues, which eventually resulted in unsuccessful surgeries that have famously left him unable to speak or eat (he takes meals through a G-tube, which is something I understand all too well, thanks to Little Quinn).

Siskel and Ebert were, in my view, one of the great duos in the history of anything. Those two had such astonishing chemistry together, that it was a joy to watch them agree positively on a movie, an even bigger joy to see them agree negatively on a movie (seriously, watching the two of them tag-team on a bad movie was always great), and the biggest joy of all when they disagreed. Then you could see some fireworks. I remember Ebert being astonished at Siskel's thumbs-down review of Scorsese's Casino; "Thumbs down?!" Ebert yelped. And there was another time – I can't remember the movie – where Ebert liked it and Siskel did not, and Ebert said something like "I don't think you wanted to like this movie", a suggestion that seemed to physically hurt the usually more acerbic Siskel. "I love to like pictures!" he protested.

One time on Late Night with David Letterman, there was a segment that had Mujibur and Sirajul, the two Indian owners of a local store, reporting to Dave from somewhere in the country. And Dave says, "If you two are out there, who's watching the store? Can we send a cameraman to see who's in charge at the store?" So a cameraman goes into the store, to reveal a very stern-looking Siskel and Ebert. OK, I guess you had to be there.

Anyway, Ebert has been writing about the movies for decades now, and he is, by nearly any measure, the critic whose work I find the most illuminating and the most evocative. I've been reading him nearly almost as long as I've been watching him on teevee, and for a number of years, his annual review collections were required book purchasing of mine. Now he has produced a memoir, which he has titled Life Itself.

Ebert's health struggles in recent years are well-known, and it's been truly fascinating to watch him take to blogging in the wake of the loss of his physical voice, a medium he had initially viewed with suspicion but which allowed his authorial voice to finally blossom to its greatest strength. Ebert has always been a fine writer, but oddly, his disability-due-to-cancer has, for many, made him even better. Maybe it's similar to that old saw about how when you lose one sense, the others somehow make substantial gains in acuity.

Reading his blog, I've mostly been struck by Ebert's ongoing zest for life, even when there were occasional posts that took an especially elegiac tone that made me wonder if he was preparing for his own departure from this world. Ebert is still with us, though, and now we have Life Itself.

The book is more a series of vignettes than a straight telling of Ebert's life. The vignettes are more or less in chronological order, but Ebert seems to be more exploring various themes in his life than the chronology of events. The book is something of a memory album that gives an impression of a life, which seems to me a good way to structure a biography. Sometimes when I read biographies, I get a sense of "plot" that couldn't possibly be there. Ebert is well aware that life is plotless, and that many of the things that shape the paths of our lives for good or ill are often accidental, a function of our coming into the circle of this person instead of that person, or even something so prosaic as taking this flight instead of that one.

It's telling that the book gives more of a sense of his development as a writer than as a critic; I suspect that Ebert believes that he would have been a writer no matter what, and it was just an accident of various circumstances that led to him writing about movies for the last forty years. There's no "Through all my life the cinema has grounded my being" or anything like that; Ebert grew up as a talented kid who liked going to movies with his buddies on Saturdays. I love when he recounts his first reviews of avant garde films; finding himself in confusion as to what the films were about, he took the approach of simply recounting his experience in watching the film. This is an approach that has gone on to inform his entire approach to movie reviewing and film criticism.

Sometimes, in the course of his blogging over the last few years, a tone has crept into Ebert's writing – that he seems to deny whenever it is pointed out, but it is there – that he is, in long form, saying goodbye to his life. I deeply hope that this is not the case. Ebert is, for me, to film as Carl Sagan is to science, and he'll be missed by me in equal measure when he is gone.

Here are some excerpts from Life Itself.

On Mike Royko:

At about six p.m. On New Year's Day of 1967, only two lights on the fourth floor were burning – mine and Mike Royko's. It was too early for the graveyard shift to come in. Royko walked over to the Sun-Times to see who else was working. A historic snowstorm was beginning. He asked me how I was getting home. I said I'd take the train. He said he had his old man's Checker car and would drop me at the L station. He had to make a stop at a twenty-four hour drug store right where the L crossed North Avenue.

Royko at thirty-five was already the city's most famous newspaperman, known for compelx emoitons evoked with unadorned prose in short paragraphs. Growing up as the son of a saloon keeper, he knew how the city worked from the precinct level up, and had first attracted attention while covering city hall. He was ten years older than me and had started at the old City News Bureau, the copperative supported by all the dailies that provided front-line coverage of the police and fire departments. Underpaid and overworked kids worked under the hand of its editor, Arnold Dornfeld, who sat beneath a sign reading: If your mother says she loves you, check it out. When I met him he'd been writing his Daily News column for two years. It was his writing about Mayor Richard J. Daley that took the city hall word clout and made it national. He chainsmoked Pall Malls and spoke in a gravelly poker player's voice. He drank too much, which to me was an accomplishment.

That snowy night the all-night drugstore was crowded. "Come on, kid," he said. "Let's have a drink at the eye-opener place." He told me what an eye-opener was. "This place opens early. The working guys around here, they stop in for a quick shot on their way to the L." It was a bar under the tracks so tiny that the bartender could serve everyone without leaving his stool. "Two blackberry brandies and short beers," he said. He told me, "Blackberry brandy is good for hangovers. You never get charged for a beer chaser." I sipped the brandy, and a warm glow filled my stomach. It may have been the first straight shot of anything I'd ever tasted. I'd been in Chicago four months and I was sitting under the L tracks with Mike Royko in the eye-opener place. I was a newspaperman. A blackhawks game was playing on WGN radio. The team scored, and again, and again. This at last was life.

"Jeez, they're scoring like crazy!" I said, after the third goal in less than a minute.

"Where you from, kid?"

"Urbana," I said.

"Ever seen a hockey game?"

"No."

"That's what I thought, you asshole. Those are the game highlights."

On books:

Chaz [Ebert's wife] and I have lived for twenty years in a commodious Chicago town house. This house is not empty. Chaz and I have added, I dunno, maybe three or four thousand books, untold numbers of movies and albums, lots of art, rows of photographs, rooms full of comfortable furniture, a Buddha from Thailand, exercise equipment, carved elephants from India, African chairs and statues, and who knows what else. Of course I cannot do without a single one of these possessions, including more or less every book I have owned since I was seven, starting with Huckleberry Finn. I still have all the Penrod books, and every time I look at them, I'm reminded of Tarkington's inventory of Penrod's pants pockets. After reading it a third time, as a boy, I jammed my pockets with a pocketknife, a Yo-Yo, marbles, a compass, a stapler, an oddly-shaped rock, a hardball, a ball of rubber bands, and three jawbreakers. These, in an ostensible search for a nickel, I emptied out on the counter of Henry Rusk's grocery, so that Harry Rusk could see that I was a Real Boy.

My books are a subject of much discussion. They pour from shelves onto tables, chairs, and the floor, and Chaz observes that I haven't read many of them and I never will. You just never know. One day I may nee to read Finnegans Wake, the Icelandic sagas, Churchill's history of the Second World War, the complete Tintin in French, forty-seven novels by Simenon, and By Love Possessed. That 1957 bestseller by James Gould Cozzens was eviscerated in a famous essay by Dwight Macdonald, who read through that year's list of fiction bestsellers and surface with a scowl. I remember reading the novel late into the night when I was fourteen, stirring restlessly with the desire to be possessed by love.

I cannot throw out these books. Some are enchanted because I have personally turned all their pages and read every word. They're shrines to my past hours. Perhaps half were new when they came to my life, but most were used, and I remember where I found every one. The set of Kipling at the Book Nook on Green Street in Champaign. The scandalous The English Governess in a shady bookstore on the Left Bank in 1965 (two dollars, today ninety-one). The Shaw plays from Cranford's on Long Street in Cape Twon, where Irving Freeman claimed he had half a million books. Like an alcoholic trying to walk past a bar, you should see me trying to walk past a used bookstore. Other books I can't throw away because, well, they're books, and you can't throw away a book. Not even a cookbook from which we have prepared only a single recipe, for it is a meal preserved, in printed form. The very sight of Quick and Easy Chinese Cooking by Kenneth H.C. Lo quickens my pulse. Its pages are stained by broth, sherry, soy sauce, and chicken fat, and so thoroughly did I master it that I once sought out Ken Lo's Memories of China on Ebury Street in London and laid eyes on the great man himself, dining alone in a little room near the entrance. A book like that, you're not gonna throw away.

On his wife:

I sense from the first that Chaz was the woman I would marry, and I know after twenty years that my feelings were true. She had been with me in sickness and in health, certainly far more sickness than we could have anticipated. I will be with her, strengthened by her example. She continues to make my life possible, and her presence fills me with love and a deep security. That's what a marriage is for. Now I know.

On Siskel:

One of the things I miss about Gene Siskel is that he's not around to make jokes about my current condition. He would instinctively know that at this point I wouldn't be sensitive, having accepted and grown comfortable with my maimed appearance. He wouldn't have started joking too soon. His jokes would have the saving grace of being funny. Here's one I'm pretty sure he would have come up with: "Well, there's one good thing about Roger's surgery. At least he no longer needs a bookmark to find his chin."

On movies:

I have seen untold numbers of movies and forgotten most of them, I hope, but I remember those worth remembering, and they are all on the same shelf in my mind. There is no such thing as an old film. There is a sense in which old movies are cut free from time. I look at silent movies sometimes and do not feel I am looking at old films; I feel I am looking at a Now that has been captured. Time in a bottle. When I first looked at silent films, the performers seemed quaint and dated. Now they seem more contemporary. The main thing wrong with a movie that is ten years old is that it isn't thirty years old. After the hairstyles and the costumes stop being dated and start being history, we can tell if the movie itself is timeless.

What kinds of movies do I like the best? If I had to make a generalization, I would say that many of my favorite movies are about Good People. It doesn't matter if the ending is happy or sad. It doesn't matter if the characters win or lose. The only true ending is death. Any other movie ending is arbitrary. If a movie ends with a kiss, we're supposed to be happy. But then if a piano falls on the kissing couple, or a taxi mows them down, we're supposed to be sad. What difference does it make? The best movies aren't about what happens to the characters. They're about the example that they set.

Casablanca is about people who do the right thing. The Third Man is about two people who do the right thing and can never speak to each other as a result. The secret of The Silence of the Lambs is buried so deeply that you may have to give this some thought, but its secret is that Hannibal Lecter is a Good Person. He is the helpless victim of his unspeakable depravities, yes, but to the limited degree that he can act independently of them, he tries to do the right thing.

...

What I miss, though, is the wonder. People my age can remember walking into a movie palace where the ceiling was far overhead, and balconies and mezzanines reached away into the shadows. We remember the sound of a thousand people laughing all at once. And screens the size of billboards, so every seat in the house was a good seat. "I lost it at the movies," Pauline Kael said, and we all knew just what she meant.

When you go to the movies every day, it sometimes seems as if the movies are more mediocre than ever, more craven and cowardly, more skilfully manufactured to pander to the lowest tastes instead of educating them. Then you see something absolutely miraculous, and on your way out you look distracted, as if you had just experienced some kind of a vision.

May Ebert's spot in the balcony remain reserved for years to come.

Photos from the White House

2012-01-16T11:30:00.000-05:00

I really love the White House Flickr photostream, and I hope that even if there's a new President in a little over a year (which I don't hope happens at all, but if it does) that the next administration keeps doing this. White House photography just fascinates me, no matter who the President is. Here's a random selection of photos that I particularly like (this service only began with the Obama administration):

Seriously, I could post a hundred more of these. I love this stuff.

And man, does the President keep a clean desk or what? Ye Gods! He's got so little stuff on his desk that if he wants to do some of his own computer work, he has to go to an adjoining office!

Go team!

2012-01-16T06:55:00.001-05:00

I don't really have a whole lot to say about football right now, except for a couple of random observations:

:: Thank God that Tebow-mania is over for a while.

:: Of course, if ending Tebow-mania comes at the price of seeing St. Tom lift another Lombardi trophy, then I'm not sure it's worth it.

:: Go Giants and Ravens.

:: Note to future NFL teams: don't win any more than 14 games in the regular season. Six teams have won 15 or more games, and of those, only the first two -- the 1984 49ers and the 1985 Bears -- won the Super Bowl. Of the others, only the 2007 Patriots even made the Super Bowl, and they lost. The other three -- 1998 Vikings, 2004 Steelers, 2011 Packers -- didn't even get there.

That's about it. Two more chances for someone to end St. Tom's season with a loss. Let's go!

Sentential Links

2012-01-16T00:30:00.000-05:00

Linkage....

:: There's a sense that a lot of us have that our public policy ought to be aiming to produce large gains for everyone. You often hear that for one reason or another the United States "can't afford" this or that. We "can't afford" to pay people Social Security benefits. We "can't afford" to build high-speed trains. We "can't afford" to give everyone early childhood education. But why can't we afford this stuff? Are we a poor country? No, we're not. We're one of the richest countries that's ever existed. Are we a poorer country than we used to be? No, we're not. But a very large share of the gains we've made over the past three decades have gone to a relatively small number of people. If the gains had been broadly shared, then the burden of paying for that basic infrastructure and public services would have to be very broadly shared. But the gains have been very concentrated, and so if we're going to afford that stuff, a large share of the revenue has to come from the people who've gotten the money.

That's not envy, that's math.

:: I could use a little Essence of Yo in my life! (I have never been able to make a yo-yo work. That is all.)

:: I will no longer be talking to Ron Paul supporters about Ron Paul. Paulites are like ultra-conservatives who believe in magic. Or they're just dumbass college kids who want marijuana legalized enough to not pay attention to the monstrous amount of racism and sexism this man spouts. I'm done with them. "Educate yourself" they always tell me. I have no choice but to assume this is meant as irony. (The most loud-mouthed Paul supporter I know is a college student who is also a 9-11 conspiracy theorist. I don't bother with Paulites anymore, except to occasionally wander into a pro-Paul discussion, ask something like "So what's the excuse-of-the-day for Paul's racist newsletters?" and then wander off without waiting to see what the answer is. Great fun!)

:: Too terrified to hurl themselves from a bridge or put a shotgun in their mouths or even take up smoking, they at least hope that each day is the day that a bag of sodium-laden chips triggers a massive stroke, after which would come blessed emptiness. But even rides on the carousel of death are now denied to them by their cruel creator. (Making fun of Funky Winkerbean is one of life's finer pleasures.)

:: To those who pontificate anxiously that the Internet keeps us separate and isolated from one another: You literally do not know what you are talking about. This PSA has been brought to you by Sheil-babe. (Preach it!)

More next week!

Sunday Burst of Weird and Awesome!

2012-01-15T19:41:00.004-05:00

Oddities and Awesome abound!

:: No. No no a thousand times NO.

:: Charles Stross predicts the future, part one and part two. Fascinating reading, even if I personally find his vision of the future a little...depressing.

:: A bit of 'inside baseball' on this one...but fine Buffalo blogger (whom I've known for years now) Alan Bedenko has been waging a somewhat mercurial campaign against Buffalo News food critic Janice Okun, whose writing tends to be harmlessly facile. The campaign seems a bit odd to me, but then, one would hope for better food writing in the region's most prominent regular publication, and that we don't have it seems to reinforce notions of Buffalo being a parochial backwater locale where the restaurant scene is too dominated by the likes of Applebee's. But whatever...a month ago, Alan wrote a post in which he noted that some odd factual claims by the owner of a restaurant Okun reviewed went unchecked, with hilarious results. Somehow -- and there's no doubt Alan didn't expect this -- he scratched the surface of something whose underbelly is very seedy indeed, and the comments on that post have been raging ever since. It's quite a thing to behold.

More next week!

Shut up, Joe. Just SHUT UP.

2012-01-15T00:30:00.000-05:00

Warning: rant ahead!

Post continues...into the rabbit hole we go....

"Greetings, Programs!"

2012-01-13T10:30:00.000-05:00

"The Grid – a digital frontier. I tried to picture clusters of information as they moved through the computer. What did they look like? Ships? motorcycles? Were the circuits like freeways? I kept dreaming of a world I thought I'd never see. And then, one day...."

"You got in!"

"That's right, man! I got in."

The first time I realized, as a kid, that there were limits to how far my interests intersected with most of the other kids was when a movie came out in 1982 called TRON.

I was, probably, the 'nerd' in school, although I wasn't walking around with my button-downed shirt tucked into my too-high pants and my writing instruments tucked into a pocket protector. I didn't wear a tie to school. (I actually loathe neckties, I didn't learn to tie one until I was 24, and I only own exactly one necktie right now whose location in the bedroom I don't even know and have not worn since a job interview in 2003. But that's another topic.) I didn't know a blessed thing about sports, so when it came time to play football or softball in gym class, I'd have to have the games explained to me.

But even so, to be in fifth and sixth grade in the early 1980s meant that we were all, nerds and jocks, part of "Star Wars nation". By this I mean that, for the most part, we all saw the same movies, so even if I had no input on conversations of the weekend's football games, I could still join in with speculations on whether or not Han Solo would return from his carbonite prison, or talk about how bad-ass Indiana Jones was, and so on. I had a friend who was as big a fan of the James Bond movies as I was, so we had those. And so on.

But along came TRON, which I wanted to see because it looked freakishly cool. And I did see it that summer, planning to discuss it with all my friends that fall when I saw them again (TRON was a summer movie). To me, TRON was the obvious next thing in the line from Jaws to Star Wars to Close Encounters to The Empire Strikes Back to Raiders of the Lost Ark to ET. However, to my dismay, not one of my friends saw TRON. I remember a couple of abortive "Hey, did you see TRON?" conversations, all of which ended with something like, "Is that the weird movie inside the computer" or something? Yes. Yes, it was. At the time I was known for various reasons as the resident 'computer nerd', so it stood to reason that I'd like the computer movie. But computers weren't ubiquitous just yet.

(Now, in truth, I wasn't that big of a computer geek. I loved them, and I dabbled, but I never really had the determination to dig as deeply into computers as I could have, and anyway, a few years later my nascent fascination for computers took a big developmental hit when I got bitten by a beast called music. There's an alternate me, though, in some other universe, in which I became one hell of a hacker who eventually wrote programs for NASA. And there's still another alternate me, I would wager, that also became a hacker but for shadowy governments and groups based in Eastern Europe. That guy sports a goatee and likes to sit in quite contemplation, steepling his fingers together as be mulls over what manner of mayhem he wishes to unleash upon cyberspace this week.)

Now, this wasn't exactly a traumatic experience. OK, the other kids didn't see TRON. No biggie. I didn't watch football, they didn't see TRON or appreciate Star Trek. It was OK. But not until college would I find other fellow travelers who'd seen and liked TRON. The movie was my first intimation of a thing that might later be called "geek culture", but at the time, it was an underground thing. The geeks hadn't taken over the world just yet, and in truth, back then it didn't much feel like they would. So into my memory banks went TRON, filed under "Things I Like That Not A Lot Of Other People Did". I certainly never figured that TRON would get a sequel, even though the innards of the ENCOM system seemed like such fertile ground for exploration.

Thus, imagine my surprise when a sequel, to be called TRON Legacy, was announced.

I suppose it was inevitable, given Hollywood's current fetish for remakes and reboots and other ways of working with old properties instead of developing new ones. Lots of times, these kinds of projects make me roll my eyes, but others make me think, "Hmmmm, why not?" (And I'd be outright lying if I didn't admit that a part of me is just waiting for Firefly to get old enough for someone in a suit in Hollywood to say, "Hey, howzabout we reboot that?" Of course, with my luck, Joss Whedon will have no involvement and Roland Emmerich will direct a script by Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman.)

I liked what I saw of the trailers to TRON Legacy, which seemed to be implying a grittier "World Inside the Computer" than the original, with a look that was unmistakably TRON but also slightly Matrix-influenced. And, even though the movie itself got generally mixed reviews, I found myself really enjoying it. Really enjoying it. TRON Legacy was, for me, like scratching a spot that I didn't realize was itchy until I touched it.

In terms of story, TRON Legacy really doesn't break a whole lot of new ground. It gives us the kid (Sam Flynn) with the absentee father (Kevin Flynn) who has a lot of issues with responsibility and a willingness to flaunt danger, but who is called upon to embark on a Quest of sorts when he receives an odd piece of information that may bear on his father's fate. In Sam's case, Kevin Flynn's old friend Alan Bradley tells him that he's just received a message from Kevin Flynn's old video game arcade, a place that has been shut down for years. Sam goes there, finds a hidden door that leads to a secret computer lab set-up, and when he starts tinkering around, a laser-imager-thing fires up, pulling Sam into "the Grid", as the System is known.

The Grid, in the movie, is clearly the World Inside the Computer from the first film, fast-forwarded twenty-eight years or so. The script used terms like "Grid" instead of other terms that we might expect, such as "The Net", which seems to cover over a conceptual point that the film never really addresses: how the World Inside the Computer of TRON would be given the surging of Moore's Law and of the development of the Internet. Maybe a future sequel (one is said to already be in development) would look into this sort of thing: what would viruses be like in the World Inside the Computer? And how would Programs – depicted as people in the System – be affected by things like DRM? But maybe this sort of thing would be too esoteric.

TRON, though, didn't really deal with computer issues either, even for the computers of the 1980s. There was never really a sense of how bad things would be for humans – 'Users' – if the Master Control Program succeeded in taking over the entire system. Ultimately, the World Inside the Computer was a setting for a not-terribly-original story of plucky heroes defying the odds against a tyrannical villain; what was unique was the film's look and the paraphernalia of the story. A lack of originality in the original story can be overlooked, if at the same time we're watching things like Recognizers, Sailships, and, of course, light-cycles. All this is, of course, mainly because TRON purported to be inspired by the just-starting-to-snowball computer revolution, but what really inspired TRON was the then-in-full-swing video arcade game craze.

TRON Legacy shows us a World Inside the Computer where things have gone wrong since the original events that, at the time, were thought to be setting the stage for a Golden Age in that world. What happened? Why? And how does it involve Kevin Flynn, and by extension, his son Sam? This is the story of the film, which involves some of the programs from the original film, mainly Flynn's alter-ego program CLU. (Now, CLU had been executed – 'derezzed', short for 'deresolution', in TRON lingo – in the original film, so either Flynn had a backup CLU or this is CLU 2.0. The film doesn't say, but there's an interesting question to be explored in the TRONiverse regarding the ontological status of backups, which would literally be identical copies of programs! In a way, they'd be more perfect than clones, wouldn't they? Bring on TRON Episode III: Attack of the Backup Copies!)

TRON Legacy makes no real effort, as I note above, to 'update' the TRONiverse in a way that reflects what we now know about computers. Instead, it goes on its way, creating its own terminologies for the System. Thus we have a subplot involving Flynn's inadvertent creation of a sentient 'race' of programs, which are then summarily destroyed by CLU; what kinds of programs would those be, anyway? TRON Legacy studiously avoids drawing parallels between what happens in the Grid and what happens in our own computers, so again, we have a story that's unfolding in an amazing-looking world that's more organic and less stylized than the blocky, 8-bit-looking world of TRON. TRON Legacy is visually stunning, there's no doubt about that. One stylistic tic of the film that I noticed in a big way is the symmetrical construction of a good many of the big, establishing shots. If you like symmetry in your movie visuals, TRON Legacy is your movie. Another is that the film is firmly entrenched in the much-derided "teal and orange" tradition which is currently at sway in movies. I'm of mixed mind on this. On the one hand, I'm tired of the limited color scheme in movies today. But on the other, it works very well in TRON Legacy, seeming like an extension of the original film's blue-and-red.

So what about that story, then? In terms of the dressings of the Grid, there's not a lot new – it all simply looks a lot better now. The light-cycle sequence in the new film is amazing, and there are more battle scenes involving the discs that Programs wear on their backs. There is a love story and there is a redemption story and there is the whole father-and-son story, which has double parallels because Kevin Flynn is not just Sam's father, but in a very real way, he is CLU's father as well. Jeff Bridges plays Flynn this time out as equal parts Obi Wan Kenobi and The Dude, to good effect, saying things like "It's amazing how productive doing nothing can be." We're not entirely sure how he's managed to survive twenty-plus years in the Grid, but it doesn't really matter. Bridges does double-duty, actually, also playing CLU with scenery-chewing malevolence. (He's also been digitally 'enyouthened', to make up a word on the spot, thus solving the problem of having CLU look like the Jeff Bridges of 1982 – or at least more like that than the Bridges of 2010.)

Sam Flynn is a pretty interesting character, too. On the one hand, he's your standard 'young man with daddy issues and trouble with responsibility', but he's not sullen or bitter, which is nice. It would have been too easy to have Sam brooding his way through the film, but he doesn't; he engages with the world, partly accepting it and partly disbelieving it.

The performance of the film, though, belongs to Olivia Wilde as Quorra, Kevin Flynn's main ally in the Grid. She is a blend of strength and intelligence and raw naivete, a program who serves a User incarnated before her, and who learns more about the world of the Users than anyone in the film should probably know. She shows up almost out of the blue, to help Sam, and we soon learn that she is Kevin Flynn's closest ally in the Grid – his only ally in the Grid, actually. She is also deeply interested in the world of the Users, having read the books that Kevin Flynn has surrounded himself with in his Grid apartment, but not quite understanding certain details:

QUORRA: Between you and me, Jules Verne is my favorite. Do you know Jules Verne?

SAM: Sure.

QUORRA: What's he like?

At the end of the film, Sam Flynn is able to bring Quorra with him into the 'real world', the world of the Users, and as the film closes, he is driving along on his motorcycle with Quorra clinging to his back as she looks with wonder on the sunset for the first time. Wilde does something here that amazes me: she doesn't so the slack-jawed stare that you might expect. Instead, she takes in the sunset, and then she turns back forward to lower her face and bury it in Sam's back, in a gesture of intimacy that's probably best saved for the back of a motorcycle. But even as she lowers her face, her eyes again flick upward and around, to see what she might see. She can't decide what to look at, but she doesn't want to stop looking, even as she acts on feelings for the son of her hero. Wilde's performance in TRON Legacy is pitch-perfect, and it is her character that is key to the whole film. Quorra's journey is the longest one in the film, and Wilde's portrayal of her quiet joy upon reaching her journey's goal is absolutely wonderful.

The music for the original TRON was provided by pioneering synthesizer composer Wendy Carlos. Given that film's video game subtext, the music was crafted to sound like video game music (and then was used in the actual TRON video game, which was, incidentally, a pretty awesome damned arcade game in itself!). TRON Legacy's deepening of the textures of its world calls for more intricate music, and it is provided by techno group Daft Punk, in what is frankly one of the finer electronic scores I've heard for a movie. It is otherworldly, sometimes rhythmically pounding and at other times dreamy, but almost always melodic and haunting. This is the kind of film music that makes me laugh when I hear other film music fans talk about how that particular art's better days are farther and farther in our past.

I would not contend that TRON Legacy is a great film. But it is a slick and extremely well-constructed entertainment.

Page One: The Dark Phoenix Saga (Uncanny X-Men)

2012-01-12T21:48:00.001-05:00

Page One: The Phoenix Saga (Uncanny X-Men), originally uploaded by Jaquandor.

My main era of comics reading was in the mid to late 1980s, spanning roughly the latter half of seventh grade until the end of my senior year, when I decided to pretty much stop reading comics on the basis that there was no way I was going to be able to afford all my monthly titles whilst in school.

For the most part I was a Marvel fan. There were titles that I didn't much care for, but I really grooved on The Uncanny X-Men from the first time I read it (issue #183 or thereabouts, my first issue being one in which Peter Rasputin has to tell Kitty Pryde about a girl he'd met on an alien planet). My entrance into the Marvel Universe was pretty much of the "jump in, buy comics, read 'em and put it all together in my head" variety, but back then, you could do that. Sure, the Marvel Universe had tons of continuity going on, but it was still fairly manageable without resorting to lots of reference stuff.

So, a couple of years after I started reading comics a lot, Marvel produced a trade paperback of something called "The Dark Phoenix Saga" from The Uncanny X-Men's issues 129 to 137. I knew enough about this storyline to know that it was already considered something of a classic of the genre, and I knew that Jean Grey's death was an event that was still showing repercussions throughout the Marvel Universe. Now I was going to find out how that death had come to pass.

That original trade paperback of mine is long gone, but I have since reacquired the "Dark Phoenix Saga" as part of one of Marvel's "Essential" compilations, which nicely and cheaply reprints lots of issues into a nice thick volume (albeit keeping the cost down by printing in black-and-white). I plowed through this entire volume a while back, and a lot of it comprised stories I didn't know, particularly the ten or fifteen issues leading up to the start of the "Dark Phoenix Saga", and a couple of issues that showed the aftermath.

The faults in Chris Claremont's stories tend to stand out quite a bit more in omnibus editions. Now, to be fair, I'm not sure if some of the most annoying style tics of his were actually tics of his or if he was directed by editors to do some of these things, but we're talking about Wolverine constantly pointing out his unbreakable claws, Cyclops constantly referring to his ruby-quartz visor, and so on and so forth. Or how it sometimes seems as though two or three pages of every twenty-two page issue is given to summing up stuff that happened before. And over time, Claremont's focuses on character interactions and complex webs of interrelationships tends to start to feel like soap opera; I remember one commentator describing his run on Uncanny X-Men as "Dallas with capes".

And yeah, that's all true. But it worked a lot better when you were reading these issues one at a time, once a month. And now, reading the omnibuses, those flaws aren't really all that distracting, when Claremont is firing on all cylinders...as he is in the "Dark Phoenix Saga".

This story starts out small. The X-Men are recovering a bit from a pretty tough battle, and there are apparently some conflicts of personality within the team (this is how things seem if you start here and not before). Professor X returns from somewhere (I don't recall where he was), and almost immediately, they detect two new mutants, one in Chicago and one in New York City. (The X-Men are always scanning for new mutants, so they might intercede and help them learn to deal with their mutancy in a world that is hostile to mutants.)

From such humble beginnings -- tired team, investigating two new mutants -- this story takes us on an ever-widening story whose scope gets bigger and bigger and bigger until, by the time we get to the final three issues or so of the "Dark Phoenix Saga", we've got full-blown space opera going on, leading to a showdown amongst ruins on the dark side of the Moon. And along the way there is a love story, seeds planted for future tales (this is where we meet Kitty Pryde, after all), and the slow but inexorable rise of Jean Grey's power until she can no longer control it.

Claremont -- along with artist Byrne -- presents one of the most cinematic stories I've ever read in a comic. In a real way, most of the comics stories of today -- and the comics movies -- can trace some piece of lineage, in terms of storytelling style, back to the "Dark Phoenix Saga". This is one of the stories that I would likely cite if someone ever asked me what stories they should read if they want to see superhero comics at their very best.

And now I want to read the bloody thing again!