Friday, November 20, 2009

"murderer."

my aim this month -- more or less because i can -- has been to post every 2-3 days. so far, i haven't quite hit that. but i have found time -- mostly on the t -- to read some really good books i can tell you about! more five-minute book reviews: everyone's favorite, right?

so today we have philippe claudel's brodeck.

i read this in one sitting; it took about 3-4 hours; and it was entirely motivated by shame. i picked the book up at the brookline public library about -- a month and a half ago, renewed it something like four times and was finally faced with having to return it the next day without ever having read it. like the man said, "not good! not good!"

so i read it and i returned it and so i don't have a copy on hand from which i can quote excerpts that might convince you without me having to go on about it that reading this book is a really good idea.

be warned, though: it isn't fun, but it is deceptively easy. i don't know what claudel is like to read in french -- i could do it, but it would take me way the hell longer than 4 hours! -- but in english he reads something like a cross between primo levi and aleksander solzhenitsyn, and...something i can't quite put my finger on. if i track it down, i'll get back to you.

without spoilering anything too badly for you -- and you really don't want me to do that because claudel has spent a lot of time putting together some really delicate rakes in some really long grass and it would be a disservice to his effort for me to point them out -- the story centers around and is told by brodeck, a returned prisoner from 'the camps' which were set up during 'the war' who has come back to his home village somewhere in what is probably eastern europe and is now faced with a demand from his fellow villagers: tell the story of their interaction with a stranger who came to town and is no now longer in town and do it right. what 'right' might be, brodeck isn't exactly sure, but he's pretty sure he knows and he's even more sure he doesn't like it, but he's not sure what to do about it.

brodeck isn't always a sympathetic narrator; sometimes he's quite frustrating, doubling back on his own story, revising it, continually apologising to us for not being a real writer, for doubting himself, for repeating himself, for not being a stronger, cleverer, better writer or man. but despite his evasions and his own stated desire not to return to his own past, he ends up telling his story and the stranger's inasmuch as he knows them. he's not entirely sure of large sections of either one, having to make them up out of what other people have told him -- voluntarily or inadvertently or through omission -- or what he can guess for himself.

the thing this felt most like to me -- apart from levi and maus -- was deadwood. there's a scene with pigs at the end of the second or third chapter that just shrieked al swearengen to me. not that brodeck himself is in anyway like everyone's favorite saloonkeeper; if he was going to be compared to anyone in the town, it would have to be doc, still continually caught in the aftermath of civil war battles.

and then for no particularly good reason except that it's friday and i can, here's another mst3k short i found resurrected on google videos:

Wednesday, November 18, 2009

"...or we can be lycans!"

five minute book-review!

1. jonathan maberry, bad moon rising. the third in the trilogy with ghost road blues and dead man's song. not the greatest last volume in a trilogy you'll ever read. i think maberry could have told this story much more effectively in two volumes. reading rising, i kept feeling like the characters were just repeating information among themselves; each set of characters -- good guys, bad guys, good guys over here without knowledge of the good guys over there, ditto bad guys, and null guys -- had to learn the same piece of information, discuss it, chew it to death, and then move on to the next shred of evidence. all this in spite of the fact that the reader, being a clever person and, possibly, well-versed in this kind of horror novel, figured it out pages ago and has been patiently waiting for the progressively dumber characters to figure it the f&%k out. i really enjoyed blues and song precisely because maberry didn't treat the reader as though s/he were stupid but he slipped up pretty badly in rising.

the pace goes all to hell -- the first two-thirds dragged and then the last third shot by so fast that, had it been a movie, i'd've been thinking, 'wow, the fight choreography/special effects/acting must really suck here 'cause they're moving too fast for me to see it!' there are some shocking, terrifying sequences -- i reference particularly a scene in the last third of the book where two of our protagonists fall into the basement of the house of our big bad guy. you really don't want to know what he keeps in the cellar. really. you don't. but you're going to find out anyway. maberry does occasionally get confused between blood/gore/squick and what is actually frightening but that's so often a matter of taste and he does both well that i don't want to complain about it too much. what's slightly more frustrating is his habit of stepping out of the action of the action scenes -- which he writes really well with a great eye for an unusual detail that pulls the whole scene into focus -- to tell you what the characters are feeling or thinking. in the middle of a fight scene, we don't really need to know that our "hero" is feeling cold and sick and nauseated. it's okay. we'll take it as read and you can catch us up on it later. right now, we're worried about the fanged nasty that's going to fall on him from the ceiling...

maberry also falls prey to making the whole thing unnecessarily complicated. by the end of song, we're fairly sure we've got a reasonably straightforward set of supernatural baddies: vampires and werewolves. some of the vamps are smarter than others; some are basically mindless killers; and we've got one clearly over-arching uber-bad guy. okay, good. we've got the right idea. and then by half-way through rising, we've got psychic vampires, psychic werewolves, dhampyrs, ancient vampires, 'fangheads,' vampire kings, evil gods, possession, demonic spirits, ghosts, and a whole range of other issues i won't even go into. all of which turn out to be almost completely unnecessary. while i often have issues with stephen king -- having hated him cordially for most of my life and only really started to read his stuff in the last three or four years thanks to a friend who swore up and down that the dark tower series really was that awesome (and it is) -- at least in salem's lot, which maberry's trilogy is absolutely a child of, he kept it simple. master vampire; spawn. there we go. end of story. simple, threatening, murderous. all done.

the only other thing i wanted to note is that the female characters in the book are, by the end, totally pathetic. if the main woman had said, "but i'm pregnant!" one more time, i was going to vote for the lead vampire to rip her throat out on the spot. it was a terrible excuse for not putting her into play as an actual, y'know, character. and there's a scene in the beginning that is just a total rip from dracula in the most painfully bad way where all the men silently realise they are willing to die for this one woman (better you than me) and all i could think was, 'mina was more kick-ass than you. any day of the week.'

all of this is not to say that wasn't fun to read. it was. it's just that, by the end of the third book, i wished there was a little less to read. it's sad when the trilogy is a slow downward slide when there is clearly the talent in place that could have made it a great upward rollercoaster ride.

Monday, November 16, 2009

"we're smarter than this!"

having had a somewhat frustrating day which involved a): waking up from a lovely dream in which i had found this great job that wanted to hire me on sight; b) waking up from said dream; c) realizing that it was, in fact, just a dream; d) having to work on an assignment where i'm basically guessing at what the professor wants because he isn't the greatest at instructions; and e) coming home from work -- after lovely walk home -- to find a letter from doctor's office saying, "gosh, we're sorry but the lab was unable to process your test results. please call our office to find a convenient time for you to return so you can undergo time-consuming, painful, and humiliating processes all over again."

gee, really? me? thanks ever so!

*headdesk*

but i only threw my socks across the room, not anything else, so i'm counting that as a minor victory and now, having been duly calmed (at least a little bit) by a hot shower and girlfriend-provided tea and chips, i decided what i really should do is put up an amusing post here because that way i could feel at least that i was making someone else's day more fun.

so here you go.

one of my all-time favorite pixar shorts, "for the birds:"



and from the mst3k crew, a charming short about always being yourself:



and a couple of my all-time favorite fan videos.

first off, evanescence and "bring me to life" used as background for shoujo kakumei utena:



same band, "going under," same anime:



same band, "hello," doctor who -- elegy for donna noble:



and, finally, a fantastic 10th doctor video:

Thursday, November 12, 2009

"this is how you remind me..."

through a post from arts & letters daily i discovered this marvellous and more than slightly strange blog called killing the buddha. through them, i discovered this video:

for the charter for compassion which is rolling out or going live or unveiling or whatever they call it today. first of all it made me think of my friend douglas who probably knew about this months ago. i have to admit, i think the video is a tad bit creepy -- the drum beats are a little too nouveau horror movie trailer for me but that could be just because i watch too many trailers for horror movies -- but i've spent some time poking around the website and looking at the people they've worked with and, even for someone as cynical as myself, it all looks reasonably genuine and well-thought-out. and i can get on board with people who are basically arguing that if you want people to behave well towards you, maybe behaving well towards them isn't a bad start.

i thought of this yesterday when i was sitting on a bench outside kupel's in brookline waiting for anna to come out with bagels and cream cheese; one of the local homeless women (unless she's a really dedicated performance artist) passed by, pushing this giant cart loaded down with what i'm guessing is all her stuff. she saw me sitting on the bench and smiled at me, so i smiled back, and she called over to ask if i had any spare change for a cup of coffee. i said i hadn't which was true and interactions like this are why i don't carry cash with me a lot of the time; at least this way i'm not lying. she shrugged and moved on. there was a guy standing near me waiting for his dog to finish with a nearby tree and he turned to me and asked with this expression of total horror on his face: "what did she say?" i explained what had gone on. the woman heard us talking and called out to him -- very politely -- to explain what she had asked me and to ask him the same question. he gave her this look of total disbelief that seemed to translate as "what is it doing talking to me!" and hurried off with his dog, muttering something that i couldn't really hear.

and because i'm not very good at writing about this kind of thing, i can't tell you what i thought next except that i remember thinking that the man over-reacted just a little. even if he didn't have anything, what was the harm in telling her so -- ideally nicely -- to her face rather than flinching back as though she had thrown something at him?

and then, because i'm absolutely incapable of leaving a post alone without putting something silly in it -- if you want a really neat-sounding explanation for why laughing at things is a good idea, the dailyom makes it sound very cool with their most recent post:



probably safe for work; it is a little risque but if you have an understanding boss or a boss with a sound sense of humor you should be fine. and you will need sound, definitely. :)

Tuesday, November 10, 2009

"if mine's mines, what's yours?"

nanowrimo and new thesis chapters between them leave little time for blogging, but i did notice on one of my news feeds from england the other day that timothy bateson has died. while i realise that he was a well-respected and immensely skillful character actor with a really really really long resume with all sorts of roles in there, the first thing i thought was, "oh, binro died." and this is why:



this scene comes in about -- oh, three-quarters of the way through an episode of doctor who called the ribos operation which is the first episode in a 6-episode arc called the key to time which made up the entirety of one of tom baker season. the young man is named unstoffe; he's a conman, working with a partner named garron, and binro has been kind enough to hide him from searching guards.

the key to time arc is great doctor who, by the way; if you're looking for an intro to the original series, you could do way worse. tom baker is on top of his game; he has great companions in romanadvoratnalundar, played with great spirit by mary tamm, and k9; and the stories are just linked enough to make a decent over-arching story without being totally driven by a single element. and there's two of my favorite episodes of all time -- stones of blood and the power of kroll -- and an episode written by douglas adams, the pirate planet.

so in memory of timothy bateson and of an family friend who also died in the last week.

Sunday, November 1, 2009

a sort of fly-by post...

taking a brief blogging break between writing blog post -- hah! -- for ebooks blog and working on the brandy-new context chapter for the thesis; i promised two highly intelligent professors that i could summarize approximately 200 years of irish history in something under 20-25 pages. hm. perhaps this was not a good idea? too late now!

but i have "in a nutshell" thoughts about a few recently watched/read things that i thought i'd toss up here for your amusement.

1. terry pratchett, unseen academicals. i posted a review of this earlier from the tor.com blog and i'm pleased to support pretty much everything that ms. jericho wrote. academicals is awesome. while i agree wholeheartedly with the idea that pratchett is, at his best, a whip-smart social commentator, i really don't think this is the best way to read his books. in fact, i think it might rank with the worst ways to read them -- right up there with trying to read them back-to-front or through a reversing mirror. going into a discworld novel looking for comment on earthly events is really not a good idea. the best discworld novels -- jingo, maskerade, the truth, thief of time -- are so clever and slick at making their points that, honestly, it's just better to take a deep breath, get some tea, and enjoy the lunacy. academicals is like that, too; the ending is great -- pratchett back in his proper form again after the somewhat leaden thud! and overly polemical monstrous regiment which is fun until you start to realise you've been hit over the head with the same damn joke 15 times and you're starting to get sore. my only piece of advice with academicals is keep your eye on nutt, glenda, and the patrician. keeping your eye on the patrician is always good advice, by the way. :)

2. iron man. i had a whole extra-ranty-goodness post all ready to go about the waste of space iron man turned out to be...and i just don't have the heart to go through with it. it wasn't that bad -- but it wasn't that good, either. i was thinking about it while walking to class the other day and i figure they could have done the film an immeasurable amount of good by doing a couple of simple things:
  1. fire gwyneth paltrow. the woman is a black hole and not in a fun way. she comes on screen -- and the scene turns up its toes and dies because it knows nothing is going to happen. at all. ever.
  2. give jeff bridges more to do. the man can be brilliant, but you need to give him something to work with
  3. decide who your villain is.
  4. oh, and please don't nick scenes directly from anime series (i'm thinking of vision of escaflowne here) 'cause, y'know, some of us have seen them.
3. the cave. i got this for halloween 'cause...well, i could. and it took me a minute to remember why on earth i thought it was a good idea -- it's because cole hauser is in it. and, on the whole, it wasn't a bad flick. predictable -- as all 'b' grade horror movies are -- but fun. the monster was -- okay. too obviously influenced by the alien in its first scenes but, on the whole, how is a creature designer going to step out from under that as a shadow? and the designer did go on to do the underworld films and those are really quite nice, so we'll forgive a momentary early slip. ;)

okay, back to describing the central importance of the rising of the united irishmen in 1798 to the later generations of irish republican nationalists. i'm considering setting up a macro to automatically fill in "Irish Republican nationalists" because, wow, am i tired of typing it!