is a blog by Brendan
There’s a decent article on MSNBC / Newsweek–an interview with Miranda Rivers, who cast the Lord of the Rings. My favorite part is where she describes her on-sight classification system:
“We would walk down the street, and people were not people, they were types: I’d be going, ‘Hobbit!’ ‘Elf!’ ‘Uruk-hai!’ ‘Rohan!’ I got a lot of elves off the street.”
I find it interesting how similar that is to the typing system (man, hobbit, dwarf, elf) Randy Waterhouse defines in Cryptonomicon.
The Post has a fairly deep and interesting article about the assembly of a His Dark Materials movie.
HDM and Philip Pullman are a source of great conflict for me. The Golden Compass is a stunningly, impossibly good book, and The Subtle Knife was excellent too. But reading The Amber Spyglass was like a punch in the stomach, or maybe a stab in the back.
I read the books as soon as they came out, so it’s been a few years. Maybe if I started Compass now I’d see it coming, but I didn’t then. It’s one thing to set up an oppressive, evil church in an alternate universe and make your point through metaphor; it’s very much another to have one of your most sympathetic characters, ostensibly from our world, say “the real Catholic Church is a bad thing and here’s why.”
It’s not like I burned the book after that, or even put it down. I finished it, and I was still affected by the story and moved by its ending. I have a difficult time even expressing what I disliked about it.
I guess what it comes down to is that my mom read Compass to the kids in her middle school class, at a Catholic school, on my recommendation. They loved it. I have no doubt that many of them went on to finish the series themselves. And it doesn’t feel right to know that they got to the end of Spyglass to find a brilliant, trustworthy author turning a shared story into a political statement against something in which they probably believed. Against a church that, in my experience, is nothing like the way he portrays it.
I have no problem with the call to question your beliefs–that’s a call it’s been my job to make, and one that I welcome for myself. And of course the reflexive response is that it’s his world, he has the right to do with it what he wants.
That’s not true. But that’s also a subject for another time.
Philip Pullman and Tom Stoppard–I’ll definitely see the HDM movies, when they finally get made. I hope they live up to the books. But it’s going to make me sick to know that there will very likely be people from my church protesting and condemning the third movie, and that there will be other people hating them for it. What does that solve? Who learns anything from that? Why such a waste of a potentially perfect story?
Well heck. While I was busy nonblogging, I managed to completely miss the two-year anniversary of this journal (this past Tuesday). This is why sometimes there will be things that say “2 Years Ago” over on the right.
Yeah, that’s basically it.
I highly recommend John Allison’s Girlspy, which I just got in the maaail to-day. And it’s great! There’s popes in it.
(Yes, I know feng shui is so done. But as I lack any natural decorating skill, I figure it can’t really hurt to look through a free book with nice pictures.)
The cool indie bookstore chain in town got bought out by Borders. The hell! This really sucks. Any bookstore in a storm, but a big nasty chain store is way down the ladder from anything locally based. I mean, Borders is the store on which Robot Stories – True Tales of Retail Hell is based. There’s not much good to say about that.
Well, actually there could be. Joseph-Beth, dude, the incumbent’s down for the count. Your move!
Says Mister Crummy, regarding this last entry:
“The obvious thing that comes to my mind is ‘3001’ by Arthur C. Clarke, which is an awful book but which features, among other things, tame, semi-intelligent velociraptors who do menial tasks like gardening. This is just an incidental detail which is not important to the story, but it’s portrayed as a good deal for everyone including the no-longer-extinct dinosaurs…
Another one is David Brin’s Uplift series, in which one type of genetic engineering (making semi-intelligent species fully intelligent) is seen as a social good and a duty. Some of the characters in the books are genetically engineered chimps and dolphins.
If a piece of technology is central to a science fiction story then usually something has to go wrong or the technology has to be abused in some way, or there’s no story. I like Brin because he’s good at coming up with different drivers for conflict.”
He’s right, and that’s a common weakness of science fiction: Neat Idea Syndrome. My Creative Writing visiting professor, Nancy Zafris, told me when asked that yes, SF did have a pretty low standing within her literary circles.
“Why?” I asked. “There’s so much vibrant, progressive fiction out there.”
“I don’t know,” she said, distastefully. “It just always seems like there’s a problem, so they have to… do something with the computer, and that’s the end.”
Which you know is ridiculous, if you’ve ever read SF, but it does make a point: Neat Idea SF exists, and it’s perceived by the casual reader as a) all the same and b) boring. The casual reader is pretty much right, when the story doesn’t involve you with a character. When it gets down to it, a Neat Idea may catch your fancy, but eventually humans are only interested in reading about themselves.
So yeah, now I want to read David Brin, because what Leonard says makes him sound like exactly the right kind of character-focused writer. Unfortunately, my current bedside reading pile is staggering. I went to the library again tonight, with my newly repaired bike tires, and picked up yet more of my reserved books (Frank Miller, Diana Wynne Jones, Rob Thomas). I’m going to have to get a new box when I move on Friday just to keep my library stuff in. Is there a twelve-step program for this kind of thing?
It occurs to me that the one thing most of my favorite science fiction authors share is an intense dislike of science. Maybe it was different back in the hard-SF technotopia days, I don’t know, but I can’t actually remember reading a book involving a future where science makes things better. Seriously, can you think of two sci-fi stories in which genetic engineering, for example, is portrayed as anything but horrible?
About half the books I requested from the library arrived yesterday (and the magic Library Computer telephoned to tell me so!), so after I got off work I biked on down to get them. About a block away, I got a flat tire.
I really should have had them replace the tires when I got it tuned, but I thought I’d save a little money and just get new tubes. Smart me. I’ll take it in this afternoon and get two new ones–the back tire is the one that popped, but I’m sure the front isn’t far behind.
Anyway, I walked the rest of the way to the library and picked up another packful of pages (Lovecraft and Lem, both of whom I’m trying for the first time, and more) and started the trek back. A few blocks on, I noticed that this store called Twice Told Books was actually open–it had always been closed when I passed before. So I decided to check it out, locked my bike to a parking meter, walked in and was eaten.
The books were so dense there. The shelves weren’t nearly enough to hold them all, so they were stacked on top, piled at the bottom, stacked on top of the piles at the bottom, everything. It smelled like dry paper and glue, exactly like the stacks at the old EKU library, before they tore it up and made it big and glassy. I spent a lot of evenings there in middle school, while Mom was earning her Rank I (again), and read a lot of books. The shelves and the overstocking and the smell were all the same, and it was a pretty memory-intensive experience.
They apparently live to buy old sci-fi and fantasy paperbacks, too, and I picked up a lot of them–Le Guin, de Camp, all books about which I’ve thought “I should own that” but never got around to buying. I even got a book I’d been thinking about lately but never thought I’d find again, because I had no memory of the author or title, only the cover illustration. It’s called The Sword and The Satchel, as it turns out, which I learned when I found its cover staring up at me from one of the aforementioned piles.
They had to kick me out when they closed. I was enthralled, and for the first time I honestly wish I wasn’t leaving Bardstown Road. The music stores and comic shop and ice cream I could do without, but I’m going to sneak back to that bookstore whenever I can.
Think they’d give me a job?
I read for at least one solid hour every day at lunch, and I’ve managed to get through all the new books I had with me already. I brought Cold Mountain with me today, because I had it and I hadn’t read it and everybody read it a few years ago, so why not. Twenty pages in, I was like “forget it.”
So tonight I went out and got my card. Finally, after twenty-two years, I have unfettered access to a metropolitan library system! This is glorious. I checked out nine hardcovers today (Flannery O’Connor, Terry Pratchett, lots of Margaret Atwood) and requested probably a dozen more, then biked back happy in the rain, my backpack taut and heavy with words.
Back from a whole, whole lot of driving (or, technically, riding). I’ve played cards and doodled and finally bought the third Sandman book and now am trying to think of things to amuse a sinus-infected Audrey. This is not to say that the sinusly infected aren’t easily amused–she’s currently zoning out at the fake wood grain on my desk–but rather that thinking of things to amuse her helps make me feel useful in the face of illness. I hate it when people are sick.
And speaking of that, I should really quit talking about “somebody” and talk about Maria, who was the person about whom I was worried and who turned out fine after all. She goes to Brown and she’s one of my best friends in the world, and now you, true believer, will have a reference for when I mention her.
I can’t do what I’d like to do, of course, and mention her name with a link to her blog, because she doesn’t have a blog. Why do so few of my friends have convenient blogs? Get a blog, Maria!
For the perceived length of this spring break, I really don’t have much other news, except this: dream school Carnegie Mellon said yes to me but no to any kind of financial support, which essentially means saying no to me, as I don’t think I’m legally permitted to Stafford-borrow as much as it would cost to go there. Still, it feels good to know that I could be there, in another life. Maybe there’s another Brendan in potentiality who software engineered himself right through Pittsburgh and into Blizzard after all.
And maybe he got smashed by a pig truck. You know, it really doesn’t do any good to speculate.
