The commentary track on the dvd is one of the stranger things I’ve heard lately. God knows how long they worked on preparing it. Even more impressive if they just winged the thing.
Author Archives: Tom Crippen
Golden Age Gallery: Wally Wood Thursday
Fandom Confessions: Books I didn’t understand
The storm passed quickly. The rain, which had been a mass of violently descending water wherein the trees writhed and rolled, was reduced all at once to oblique lines of silent gold breaking into short and long dashes against a background of subsiding vegetable agitation. Gulfs of voluptuous blue were expanding between great clouds — heap upon heap of pure white and purplish gray, lepota (Old Russian for “stately beauty”), moving myths, gouache and guano, among the curves of which one could distinguish a mammary allusion or the death mask of a poet.
I read Speak, Memory when I was fifteen, in the spring. I passed out, then awoke a few years later in college. In between was a period when my brain became about as useful to me as a shoelace knot that has tightened until no fingernail can pick it apart. I wanted to write like Nabokov and my brain cramped. The problem, the cramp, had been years in the making, and I’ve had similar problems since, just because I am the way I am. But that particular episode was long and severe, and preferably people spend 15, 16, and so on in discovery and adventure, not in sitting on the edge of their bed and feeling real fear because they missed the whole point of Pale Fire (the narrator is really what?).
The best part of Pale Fire, as far as I know:
I am the shadow of the waxwing slainBy the false azure of the window pane
Is that how it goes? Close enough. When I read the book, that bit was all I could find to like. I dragged myself thru page after page, hunting for bright language like birds hunting for seed on frozen ground. Let me be clear that I’m not pronouncing judgment on Pale Fire. For me, having read the book is pretty much the same as not having read it; brain cramp will do that to you. I do know that I found less bird seed scattered about than was on hand in Pnin, The Defense, Sebastian Knight, and my favorite (though largely by default) The Gift. Then there was Ada. I guess Ada bored me even worse than Pale Fire.
Even when a book had what I was looking for, the images, the turns of phrase, I had no interest in anything else there. His books, for me, were made up of long dullness broken by bits of sparkle that nobody else could match. I was always bored, like a kid with his chin against the window during a long car trip, waiting for a gas station to flash by so he can see it lit up against the night.
Possibly Nabokov was too much of an adult for me. Forget his symbolism and aesthetic philosophy and so on. Even just his humor might have been above me; as I recall, underneath all the surface stylistic play and along with whatever advanced symbolic patterning he indulged in, he also went in for a lot of social comedy: the absurd behavior of the emigres at their literary gatherings, the self-satisfied unspoken quote marks around a foreigner’s use of slang (“the Pond” for the Atlantic). Then again, those are the bits that made it thru to me alongside the sparklies. It’s everything else that’s faded. And what all that was, I can’t say. Everything’s a blank.
Bottom line: I read out of ambition driven by fear, and I made my brain and soul hurt. I did pick up some useful knowledge of how to write sparkly bits (I really pored over the samples I found), but one can only wish I had been slightly more positive in attitude.
Golden Age Gallery: Eisner Monday 3
Today it’s an Eisner magical mystery tour. (Last Eisner Monday was here.)
Fandoom
I think I just invented this word, possibly; results from Google are mixed.
It seems like a natural. People are always complaining about fanboys and fangirls, fannishness. “Fandoom” has got to come in handy.
Justice League: Flat
I just saw a couple of episodes of Bruce Timm’s Justice League cartoon series. The series had been recommended, and you generally hear good things about Timm and his shows. But, on the other hand, I’ve never actually enjoyed any episodes I watched of these series. The same with this weekend’s Justice League episodes (“Paradise Lost” 1 & 2, about Felix Faust bossing around Wonder Woman because he’s turned her mother to stone). Nice animation work, as far as I can judge, pleasing colors, well-done sound, okay cast of voices. But the writing is dumb. I mean, in its way I’m sure it’s as professional as everything else about the shows, but that way is very limited. The characters don’t do or say interesting things, they just hop around until the plot’s requirements have been fulfilled, and the plots don’t seem that remarkable. My impression is that the stories are pretty much the sort of thing modern-day DC stories are, but telescoped and without any smutty stuff.
I don’t know if others agree about the writing and accept it as part of the deal — maybe the look of the shows can make all else worthwhile, if you’re so inclined — or if the writing strikes others as being better than it strikes me.
Personally, I wonder if there’s much any writer can do with 22 minutes to tell a story to kids, not unless he/she is being funny and/or dealing with some very particular moment, as opposed to writing about a bunch of people milling about and pursuing various complicated and very serious aims. When that’s the subject, a writer’s doing his job if she/he just lines up the story elements and keeps them clear for the audience. But I sure don’t find the results interesting.
Sorry, I just find this funny
From a Tory newspaper of the nineteenth century via Wikipedia via Balloon Juice:
Shelley, the writer of some infidel poetry, has been drowned, now he knows whether there is a God or not.
It’s so brutal and childish, so vindictive, but also so straightforward. “Hey Shelley, how about it. You see God now?” I like it that the notice doesn’t assume God really exists and that Shelley must be meeting his deserts in the afterlife. He’s dead, and that’s enough to make the guy who wrote the notice happy. The fellow, whoever he was, may not have cared much about God’s existence or nonexistence; possibly what he condemned was just “infidel” opinions, the foppishness of free thinking. If so, this strikes me as a very Tory combination of attitudes.