enigma_prime

That's it. I've got it. I might have mentioned that when writing the first draft of Dustfall there was a point around the 20-25k mark where all the character dynamics clicked into place and I realised what the plot was about. In that case I realised that the three main characters represented three different perspectives on a spectrum: one looking at life for the benefit of the individual, one concerned only with the society as a whole, and the lawkeeper figure who's meant to bear both perspectives in mind and determine where to compromise between the two.

I've just had the same sort of epiphany for Picketwire - and coincidentally it's also at a similar mark (21,597, as it happens.) I've been aware that so far my protagonist Mal has been pretty passive with little distinctive identity coming out. I've been finding whenever she speaks to someone the conversations are almost all one-sided in favour of the other person, with her rarely contributing more than encouraging tokens to keep them going.

But now I've seen what this novel is about. I've known for a while that one of the core themes is that this city is on the cusp of an ideological revolution - I usually describe their tech level as 'within a generation they'll have turned steampunk'. Even in my plot outline on the NaNo website I mentioned that the murder mystery that takes place within the story is in one sense incidental to the social changes it kicks off.

Given this setup, and plenty more besides, it's now staggering that I hadn't realised I needed to put the main characters on another spectrum: this time of the status quo. Effectively whether the characters are looking to the past, present or future. And the great thing about it is it makes perfect sense with all sorts of hints I've thrown in so far - for example the Heritagist movement (essentially the same as the Medievalists from the early 19thC - see here) is the past, most of the proletariat are the present, and Mal now becomes a futurist. Which works well, because she's young and student-y and hasn't been comfortable with the adult status quo for long enough to have much emotional attachment to it. (And if the novel ends the way I think it will, it'll have much more of a bittersweet resonance than I'd initially had.)

I wonder if this happens to most authors - that, no matter how much they think about the thematics at the start, halfway through they'll find a way to reinterpret the novel completely and add entirely new thematic levels. That their genre story suddenly becomes more suffused with Meaning and Purpose and all those other good bits that are great to justify why they're spending so much of their free time writing this novel.

"It is as easy to dream up a book as it is difficult to put it on paper."
Balzac (which should be pronounced as it is in The Music Man - distastefully, emphasis on "BALL-sack"

I toyed with the idea of having poppies delivered in time for today, but was distracted by other things. (Though I know more than a few ex-Brits here or Americans who've previously lived in the UK who also wanted to wear these. I sense a potential business enterprise next year.) Still, I observed the two minutes of silence (albeit timezone-displaced) and I've been thinking about military heroics and sacrifices all day.

This time last year* I highlighted the life and works of William Hope Hodgson, the horror fiction writer whose work I'd read limited amounts of but have intensely enjoyed.

I'm even less qualified to talk about Bert Christman. The full story is here, but here's the concise version from the excellent Comic Book Legends Revealed column. (All authorship and copyright etc. due to Brian Cronin)

Like many of the creators of the Golden Age, Bert Christman's name has become almost unknown. Which is a shame, not only for his creative contributions to comics, but also for the work he did in real life.

Christman is probably best known today as being the co-creator, with Gardner Fox, of the original Sandman in 1939. [The one who wore a fedora and gas mask - he very briefly appeared in Vertigo's Sandman #1 where he claimed inspiration from Morpheus.]

His other claim to fame were the stories he did backing up Superman in Action Comics starring "The Three Aces": "Whistler Will" Saunders, "Gunner" Bill and British "Fog" Fortune.

The three men were initially soldiers of fortune, and Christman actually drew the serial WHILE flying for the Navy! He would presumably send them in while on leave.

With the advent of World War II, the Three Aces went to China to fight against Japan, and so did Christman as well. In 1941, Christman ceased his work on the Three Aces strip, as he was now in China, fighting on behalf of the "American Volunteer Group" of pilots made famous in the films of the time.

Christman was shot down in early 1942, and was wounded in his escape from the plane.  However, he recovered and was back in the cockpit by the end of the month.

Tragically, on January 23rd, 1942, Christman was part of a squadron sent to cut off an attack on Rangoon in Burma. Christman was shot down and killed in the battle.

Let us do our best to keep Christman in our minds.


*At which point I must make a correction to last year's piece. I'd previously said that H.P. Lovecraft must have read House on the Borderland, as there are such obvious parallels between the novel and several of Lovecraft's stories. This is incorrect; I remember reading Lovecraft only encountered Hodgson very late on, after he'd written his Cthulhu Mythos material.

In just a few hours NaNoWriMo begins. And I think this is the perfect time to share something I heard from the discussions at ReaderCon.

I believe it was Catherynne M. Valente (author of The Orphan's Tales) who heard about the NaNoWriMo in 2000 as a scheme to write a 50,000 word novel in thirty days. She thought that sounded far too easy, and used it as an excuse to write her first novel, Labyrinth.

She then put her money where her mouth was and wrote it in ten days.

Furthermore, she managed to sell it, though admittedly she had to go through a few more drafts. And it seems to be quite well reviewed.

So yeah. Think of this as a de-motivational anecdote to whet your appetite. And good luck. Juggling writing, work and life is going to be a challenge. On your marks... get set...



"When a man becomes a writer, I think he takes on a sacred obligation to produce beauty and enlightenment and comfort at top speed."
Kurt Vonnegut (from Cat's Cradle)

Erm...yes. I wasn't expecting my timetable reshuffle to obliterate LJ writing time completely. And since I'm doing NaNoWriMo it's not as if I'll be resuming any time soon. (Though I've been reading writing guides these past few weeks and have harvested quite a few useful or amusing quotes, so I might be posting them.)

In short: yes, am still here, still working and ever busier on extracurricular stuff. Novel research devours time - and since I'm copying down all potentially interesting ideas, it can take up to ten minutes for me to read a single page of my medieval cities tome. (I like the idea that of the six main blueprints of a new London that were drawn up after the 1666 fire, three of them were bog standard grids and another two were (independently derived) near copies of the Paris layout, just with more star-shaped intersections.)

"I thought your book was good. They say everyone has a great book inside him. I look forward to yours."
John Danton (quoting a precocious teenager who'd just read his first manuscript)

One of the hazards of reading short story anthologies, especially 'greatest short stories ever' collections, is that certain stories will appear over and over again. I've run across Shirley Jackson's The Lottery at least three times, and any anthology of nineteenth century horror seems contractually obliged to include Saki's Sredni Vashtar. Both of these are excellent, mind you, and I'm perfectly happy for these to be regularly reprinted and exposed to new audiences.

But it's slowly making me appreciate the quality of anthology editors who don't simply go for the obvious choices in the back catalogue, but who go out of their way to track down obscure gems. I hold up the late Peter Haining as being especially good at this - his comic fantasy anthology The Flying Sorcerers, and particularly The Frankenstein Omnibus, contain good stories that haven't been reprinted at all since their initial appearance in 1890's magazines.

(Of the many books I picked up this weekend, one anthology I'm especially interested in is of SF and fantasy written by authors considered to be thoroughly mainstream. I'm especially intrigued the SF John Steinbeck wrote. Yes, really. I wish I could tell you more about that one, but I can't remember what the anthology was called, and as my newly purchased books are in one big stack taller than me, it would be a precarious job finding out. I've almost had a bookslide once today.)

Anyway, the same stories repeat every so often. And for the first time since I started this project, I've read a story for the second time without realising I'd already read it. This is somewhat embarrassing, since it implies I'm forgetting some of the things I've read completely, somewhat removing the point of reading them in the first place (except, in some cases, to check that their contents were wholly unmemorable). Every other repeated story I've managed to identify from the first few pages, if not the title, but not this one. Actually, I felt a twinge that I'd read this before half-way through, but it was so good I read on anyway.

The offending story is Wilkie Collins' The Adventure of a Terribly Strange Bed. It's about a rich guy in Paris who, bored with gambling in casinos with men who can afford to lose money, decides to go to one of the seedier establishments where the players are truly desperate. And then... I won't go on, suffice to say that it has a good atmosphere, entertaining characters and setup, and is put together with an excellent degree of skill. For something written in the 1850s it's shockingly readable nowadays. And it's only about 10 pages long.

So there we have it. And now I'm off; my housemates and I are just about to hunker down and watch the two hour premiere of House season 6. Having seen the first minute of it, it makes me wonder how much they're willing to change the formula of the series. It's entirely possible the answer is 'quite a lot, at least for the first eight or so episodes', but I'll have to see.

Excerpt from Use of Weapons by Iain M. Banks, all copyright stuff to him, etc. The excerpts only remove descriptive passages of the surroundings that would otherwise be distracting. Very good space opera, incidentally. Not quite a fun read, but a quickly paced one.

"Aw, Darac, come on; argue, dammit."

"I don't believe in argument," he said [...].

"You don't?" Erens said, genuinely surprised. "Shit, and I thought I was the cynical one."

"It's not cynicism," he said flatly. "I just think people overvalue argument because they like to hear themselves talk."

"Oh well, thank you."

"It's comforting, I suppose." [...] "Most people are not prepared to have their minds changed," he said. "And I think they know in their hearts that other people are just the same, and one of the reasons people become angry when they argue is that they realise just that, as they trot out their excuses."

"Excuses, eh? Well, if this ain't cynicism, what is?" Erens snorted.

"Yes, excuses," he said, with what Erens thought might just have been a trace of bitterness. "I strongly suspect the things people believe in are usually just what they instinctively feel is right; the excuses, the justifications, the things you're supposed to argue about, come later. They're the least important part of the belief. That's why you can destroy them, win the argument, prove the other person wrong, and still they believe what they did in the first place." He looked at Erens. "You've attacked the wrong thing."

"So what do you suggest one does, Professor, if one is not to indulge in this futile... arguing stuff?"

"Agree to disagree," he said. "Or fight."

"Fight?"

He shrugged. "What else is left?"

"Negotiate?"

"Negotiation is a way to come to a conclusion; it's the type of conclusion that I'm talking about."

"Which basically is disagree or fight?"

"If it comes to it."

The foreseeable future has ended, paradoxically, with some entirely foreseeable events.
The office is now in the second tax season, growing busier as we approach the deadline for the extended returns (of which there are many, perhaps even more than the ones we filed on time).
There are three other housemates living here again, and my regular Saturday bulk meals might make a return.
(After all, if I'm working full day shifts I don't have time to cook in such quantities in the evenings and still get stuff done.)

With this,
with the reintroduction of various groups that went on hiatus over the summer,
with the remains of my neurological experimentation locking out at least two hours each day for writing fiction,
and with the fad for scrutinising the structure of other people's daily blogs receding into the past,
it looks like I'll be lacking both the time to keep up my attempts at daily posting and any psychological need for broadcasting my opinions.

I'll still torment you with posts, but on more of a regularly irregular schedule than before.
(And just as a taster of how irregular this might get, I wrote this four days ago but I've only just remembered I never posted it.)

I'm out of pre-plotted essays, and my obsession with Code Geass has slackened after I sated it with several hours' research over the weekend. And my eventual verdict of the series? Yeah, it's pretty good - something to recommend to people who like that sort of thing, but not wholeheartedly.

(Though I have one final point to mention: ( One last bout of spoilers )

Instead, I've found myself something else to be obsessed about. I've just joined another weekly writing group, which is run by someone who's apparently a big fan of steampunk. Though I haven't written anything in that subgenre before, I've set myself a challenge to complete a 1000 word story within the milieu by next Tues. I think I'm trying to cram a ridiculous amount of plot into a story that size, but no matter, it's a writing deadline and they're always great for wringing out extra productivity. Even so, I should probably have planned to write a story that didn't require me to read a complete novel before I'm able to start...

In other news: after a long absence, the house is filled with the pitter-patter of tiny feet. The ferrets and their master have returned! Fuzzies are available on demand again! Huzzah!

TV/film executives, and to a lesser extent publishing editors, are wonderful scapegoats. As soon as fans hear that the original creator was forced to change his original script by the higher ups, anything they don't like about the finished project can be blamed on the meddling executives.

In many cases this is true to a certain extent. After all, there have to be fans looking out in the first place for accusations of meddling to arise - it happens to amateur scriptwriters even more often, but there's a lot smaller chance you'll ever hear about it. (Demonwarp is a good example. Ever heard of it? Exactly.)

For a creator to have fans looking out for their work, either the creator has done things in the past to get a fanbase, or they're writing about pre-existing characters that already have a fanbase. (A third possibility, that the finished tampered work is still strong enough or a promising enough failure that it gets its own fanbase, is possible but rare; arguably things like Evil Dead and Donnie Darko count, but in those cases the executive meddling was confined to the distribution process.)

Going with the first option, the creator has done previous works that have garnered at least a cult audience. It can therefore be assumed that the creator in his previous work was good or better in one or more aspects; plot, characterisation, visual flair etc. If these qualities are lacking in the finished product and it's known the project was the victim of executive meddling, the fans can blame the executives for screwing up what must have already been working in the first place. (All in frequently doomed attempts to increase the potential audience, of course.)

But there are cases where because it's known executive meddling took place, fans blame the higher ups for everything they don't like about the finished product. Even though the finished product may not be all that different from the creator's intentions.

Babylon 5 is an excellent example of this. Fans know that this was always intended to be a five season series, that the executives cancelled the fifth so JMS (the creator) compressed his plans to tie up all the big story threads by the end of season four, only to be told at the last minute that season five had been uncancelled after all. This left him with no planned story, and is cited as why season five is a lot quieter than the preceding ones and is generally considered not as good.

Except that JMS has said in various places that season five is largely as he planned it to be. After all, his original plan was to end season four with ( B5 spoilers... )

Another example appears to be Code Geass (you knew I'd get there eventually). One of the creators said early on that thanks to executive meddling, R2 would be completely different from what he'd originally intended. This led to announcements of 'trainwreck' even before R2 had started airing, and just about all the flaws of the season were subsequently laid at the executives' feet.

The odd thing is, in the creator's interview that kicked off the whole trainwreck thing, he mentioned not one R2 plotline that had been derailed, but two - both with contradictory thematic arcs.

To me it sounds like the executives stepped in and gave their dictates at quite an early stage in the planning process. Furthermore, in a later interview it's mentioned that the series ended as they had always planned it to end.
( R2 Spoilers... )

Speaking of original versions, I came across one (completely unsubstantiated) source that said that in the creators' original plan for the series, there weren't any mecha in it at all. Perhaps my speculation of what the series would have been like without mecha was more insightful than I'd realised...

(I wish.)

I said after I'd just finished watching the first season of Code Geass that I'd had a cursory look at the reviews for R2 and didn't exactly find them complimentary. I therefore prepared myself for mentally writing how I'd have handled R2 as I watched it - I do this with most story-driven things when they aren't occupying my full attention.

I first had my doubts about this scheme a few episodes in, where I found myself liking the plot twists and (some of) the character moments they were throwing in, even if in places it felt like they were hammering the reset button.

I stopped my mental writing eight episodes in, when the series did exactly what I was hoping they'd do. And for the rest of the series they threw in a surprising number of my favourite concepts. Which may explain my more favourable attitude to R2 than R1. (And yes, I know the first season isn't technically called R1, but it's a handy appellation to distinguish the seasons, deeper meanings be damned.)

To elaborate: ( spoilers. Lots and lots of spoilers. )

- My housemates have found the Rocky Horror photos of myself online. Evidently they have already been acclimatised to my weirdness; rather than be scared, they told me I had to wear it again for Hallowe'en. I won't, since the costume's back in England, not to mention places of it are hemmed by a stapler and tied together with shoelaces. Still, I suppose this means I'll have to come up with something similarly disturbing this year that's not simply a rehash of EP crossdressing.

- Crazy fan theories are one thing, but there are just too many ones about the importance of waffles in the Heroes universe - the sheer volume of the suggestions listed here are starting to make me believe that at least one of them is true...

-And here's an extract from The First Time I Got Paid For It, where a novice writer has been invited to brainstorm with Alex Haley, a very successful scriptwriter:
"During this discussion I saw an unusual art object on the wall. A nickel, a dime and three pennies were backed against black velvet and ensconced in a Plexiglass container. When I asked Alex about this, he smiled and declared it was what he had in his pocket the day he discovered Roots [his first script] was being published. 18 cents! He further explained he'd only had wilting lettuce, two catsup packets, and a half-empty jar of Miracle Whip in his refrigerator. His plan was to have a salad with french dressing for dinner that very night..."

- In doing my background reading for the slashfics, I've been reminded of Rule 63: "For any given male character, someone has created a female version of that character (and vice versa)." This is quite a fun rule for those too jaded for Rule 34 to disturb them anymore. I also realised that if I switched all the genders in my novel, it'd be a lot less palatable to read. (Which might be a good reason for doing it, I suppose.)

Actually, what with temporarily retuning my writing to slashfic sensibilities, I'm half-tempted to put in a couple of ambiguous lines in my novel to give fodder for shipping Cass/Ty FTW...

First, I tried to review Code Geass R2 normally. Then I tried to be less critical and only put my thoughts down. Then I tried to simply make a list of stuff I liked and didn't like. Even this grew far too rambling. If all goes to plan, I'll serialise some of my opinions in chunks a bit closer to bite-size. You can assume that all of these posts are spoiler-free (assuming you know the premise, up to the first episode of R1), except for the bits hidden by cuts or in white text. If there's a paragraph with parts of lines missing, that's why. Either that, or I grew bored and started putting in useless spaces masquerading as spoilers.

In the introduction to his early novel Protector, Larry Niven mentioned that the earliest draft had been much more from the super-intelligent alien's point of view, but he couldn't do the alien's intellect justice. This is a common problem in SF when dealing with vastly smarter beings or entities, even if you're only writing dialogue for them. (From a past review: "Clue: when writing cosmic entities' dialogue, avoid contractions.")

Master tacticians are also difficult to pull off. Their schemes might be presented as so simple that the other side really should have thought of that as well; rather than presenting the schemer as a mastermind, it simply makes their opponents seem like gormless idiots. Conversely the schemes can be so complex and require multiple levels of 'You think you've already figured out what I'm thinking, so I'll do this instead', your suspension of disbelief snaps and you conclude that the schemer must be a precog to have any chance to pulling these schemes off. A good example of this is the ending of Death Note.

In comparison, military tacticians tend to be easier to write, since the author just needs to find the troop movements of a suitably decisive battle and basically recreate it. It assumes the enemy generals are idiots for having forgotten this from their training, but as the vast majority of the audience won't recognise it either, this is a fair fudge. The enemy generals may still be seen as incompetent for having fallen into the trap, but no more so than the real-life ones.

(Even so, there are certain battles that everyone wants to refight. In fact, many generals of the past two millennia have tried to reenact the Battle of Cannae, in which the Carthaginians were greatly outnumbered by eight full Roman legions yet managed to annihilate them with minimal casaulties. They effectively used a type of pincer movement. This is very popular even today; in the last few weeks I've seen it in King Solomon's Mines, and LeLouch tries something similar in ( Spoilers ))

Against these scripting challenges, LeLouch's reputation as a master strategist doesn't fare too badly.* Granted, by R2 the overwhelming importance of the individual and increasingly magical mecha mean directly stealing tactics from history is all but impossible. Even so, there are a few neat examples, two in particular that make good use of the local terrain:

LeLouch getting the Black Knights' submarine to ( More spoilers )

(Actually, this reminds me of another point. In any anime fight, whether in person or by mecha, it's pretty much inevitable that the badguy will say half-way through, "You leave me no choice but to use this," or "Nobody has ever survived when I use this," and reveal an ability, transformation or gadget that suddenly makes them a lot more powerful. Although sometimes this new power has undesirable side effects, plenty of times you're left wondering why the badguy doesn't simply use that attack all the time.

LeLouch says one of these lines just before ( Yet more spoilers ). This seems more appropriate than most, given that its existence has been well foreshadowed, it fits with LeLouch's character, and tells more about his current state of desperation than any number of those close-ups of his shaky bulging eyes.)

The other... I won't try to explain it fully (partly because I've only just noticed how long this is already), but it's when ( Hiding, hiding, hiding )Though contrived, it's plausible, it sells both of them as master tacticians, and that automatically lifts up a battle that is otherwise largely fighty fighty fighty. It's probably the only time the series got me to like Xing-ke, but that's for a later post...


*When he's not making impossible chess moves, that is...

I'm not sure if Julie & Julia's made it to UK cinemas yet, but no matter. It's... well, you couldn't call it a chick flick, but I still felt like I was docking my manhood at the entrance. In some ways this is a film version of a cookery show with a smidgen of plot.

Its tagline is 'Based on two true stories'. The first of these is the life of Julia Child, who wrote a cookbook Mastering the Art of French Cooking, which first presented French recipes to the American public in an easy-to-follow manner. Apparently it's own of the most important American cookbooks ever written. Meryl Streep stars, and once again she's captivatingly brilliant in the role.

The other story is that of Julie Powell, a 30-something stuck in a dead-end job and bored with her life until she hits upon the idea of cooking all 524 recipe in Julia Child's book in one year. She records it all on her blog, she goes through trials of burning things and spells of disillusionment but pulls through in the end, yadda yadda yadda. (You might be able to tell which story I found more interesting.)

I suppose the film could be called a romantic comedy, except the romance is more directed towards the love of cooking than anything else. Well, both protagonists have husbands on-screen with them much of the time, but they're so impossibly saintly there's not much of a story there. For the mood, yes, foils for the gentle comedy aspects and supports for the love-of-food aspects, but no lasting story beyond that.

I suppose it's telling that when we left the cinema, my relatives all said how much they enjoyed it. After about an hour, when we started to mull over what we'd seen, we found more and more places in the film that turned out to the pointless, or aspects we wished they'd explored further, or bits that didn't hold together once you broke beyond the feel-good sheen.

But I don't deny it's light fun while it lasts, and if you're into cooking in any way it's a pleasing way to spend two hours. You're there for the transient pleasure of watching it, don't treat it as anything more and you'll be happy.

Back to the grindstone, except now it's moving faster than it has been for a good few months. Less free time, but a better chance of ending the month in the black. I also needed to go shopping and cook something in industrial quantities this evening, which yielded a mildly experimental chili con carne. The cayenne peppers, whilst not delivering the thermonuclear punch I was hoping, still have a nice little delayed kick to them.

Since I skimmed over several recipes before starting (as opposed to using Widget's version, which I usually stick to), I added a few unusual ingredients, including a few shots of bourbon. This works quite well, and I like to think of it as the manlier version of cooking wine. (Using spirits also makes the 'one for me, one for you' style of cooking with wine somewhat more hazardous.)

These, combined with a growing obsession to find out as much as possible about what the original plans for Code Geass R2 were, have left me with little time this evening, so I'll simply leave you with neko-ears LeLouch...

And to think, now I'm back in Philly, but five and a half hours ago I was in the Atlantic Ocean. Granted, it was incredibly windy, so you had to keep actively walking (swimming would get you nowhere) against the tide to avoid being swept away. So not quite as fun as previous days.

I spent a few days with my immediate family, which went by all too quickly, and with my American relatives, which was probably a day or two longer than ideal. (Exacerbated by having seen the latter group last weekend too.) One of my relatives has become hugely polarised towards the rights of the individual, claims that anything governments try to do is inherently wrong/evil, and attacks any remotely socialist institution. He also likes to provoke what he must think are discussions, but which quickly turn into arguments, and wielding a sledgehammer-like insistence that his view is right. Frankly, it's good to be away from that.

On a lighter note, my sister and I discussed for a good hour or so the merits of certain slashfic pairings, and she's now given me a shopping list of ships she wants me to write (ones she thinks are promising but has rarely seen done well). Discarding the ones for shows I haven't seen or don't remember well enough (just about all I remember of Descendants of Darkness is that the cast were all bishies), I can see promising spins on Ed/Roy and Fred/George/Lupin. She's also told me that the main website I get slash from is regarded as one of the worst collections out there, which considering the general quality (very much of the 'insert tab A into slot B' style of writing) didn't come as a complete surprise.


My pseudo-uncle, when we were out on a 'cocktail cruise' on his sailboat:
"The challenge is to drink as much as possible and still be able to tie her up at the end of it."
Granted, he was talking about his boat, but he's not the sort of person to make that kind of innuendo deliberately, so...yay?

My mother and less childish sister are using me as an excuse to fly out to Philly for a week. When asked if there was anything I wanted them to bring, I could only think of two things:

1) A box of treasury tags. Seriously, these things simply don't exist in this country. I don't use them very often, but when I need them I find little else can really take their place. My only foreseeable use would be to bind manuscripts, but I'm sure other uses will toddle along.

2) Two of the largest books I own. (Well, excluding a few oversized artbooks.) One of them's a nice thick hardback, Building Jerusalem (which I raved about two years ago here), and the other's London: A Biography, a 900 page colossus I read last year, which I don't think I raved about but could easily have done so. These two probably filled up whatever leftover space was in their bags.

And why? Because these are excellent reference books for how London has worked through the ages. I did some superficial culling of useful facts when I first read them, but now that I'm gradually gearing up to build my city of PicketWire, I'll be wanting more detail than my meagre notes hold.

Yes, yet more books. I've basically given up on the idea of restraining my collection, now that I own enough I want to keep that I'll need to use a shipping contained to get them back to England eventually. At this stage I can still claim that I'll have read most of the books I own by Christmas. Unfortunately I've discovered that one of my author friends is really rather good - I've been devouring three of his essays a day since I picked up his collections.

Said author also deals in second-hand books. Now, I'm starting to become quite fond of L. Sprague de Camp, a Golden Age SF author who I've tentatively added to my 'is always worth a look' list (T.C. Boyle, Thomas Ligotti and Robert Silverberg being my latest such additions). Unfortunately I've discovered that the book dealer has almost a complete set of de Camp's works, and furthermore the copies that de Camp owned himself. The temptation to procure these books with such a totemic connection to their author is growing irresistible.

Anyway, family's here, so I probably won't be back until next Wed. Unless I really need a means of escape.

Last week's Rifftrax mumblings (before they were hijacked) were originally written to lead up to when I saw a very special screening of Plan 9 From Outer Space at a nearby multiplex. This was being broadcast to over a hundred cinemas across the country at the same time for one night only. The film's sound was being transmitted from a single location, where three of the main Rifftrax guys were there to give their commentary live.

(Cinema staff being incompetent, this meant they didn't manage to connect the sound up properly for the first five minutes, causing much initial chanting of "Refund!" Fortunately we only missed the first half of a short, a Fifties training video for airline stewardesses. With their fully flat beds partitioned by curtains along the line of sleeper trains, it's arguable that the introduction of fully flat seats in First Class were merely returning to the original model of passenger flight.)

It also gave me another chance to reappraise Plan 9. I'd previously only seen it once at Bath, where I found enormous difficulty in interpreting it as a film at all. It just felt like a random assortment of scenes unrelated to each other, footage of people wandering around in woods, and scenes of people 'acting' in front of curtain backdrops that looked more like something out of a children's play.

Seeing it again, I was definitely wrong. It's clearly story-shaped, and furthermore a story that Ed Wood must have thought was imparting a serious message (essentially the same as The Day the Earth Stood Still, except that in this one the aliens get blown up and the fact that humanity will obliviously blow up the entire universe is cheerfully ignored). It's now one of the most hilariously bad films I've ever seen. I'd still choose Robot Monster over this, though it's now a very close call.

In other news: I think I might have been reading a few too many nineteenth century correspondence letters recently. My family might be surprised when my next weekly letter home turns up stuffed with archaisms. In fact, count yourselves lucky this post isn't ending with "Yours etc." or similar unnecessaries.

(This point is prompted by reading H.P. Lovecraft's biography. It's riveting stuff, but I've decided that in the future I should stay away from biographies about authors with questionable mental states. Too much temptation for compare-and-contrast, and they might give me ideas.)

Speaking of which, everyone remember the aliens in Indiana Jones 4 coming from "Not space, but the spaces between spaces"? Here's a segment from The Dunwich Horror:

"...The Old Ones were, the Old Ones are, and the Old Ones shall be. Not in the spaces we know, but between them." (Emphasis in the original.)

And on the writing front, the main character's just spoken a few lines in a "violently polite voice". I'm curious what that actually sounds like (or whether it's just overwritten).

City too hot. Off to beach. Back Monday.

"Real subtle product placement there, America."
Rifftrax commentary as the camera pans over a fluttering American flag

MST3K has been a bit of a disappointment. I've watched half of season 0 and dabbled in season 1, and their lacklustre commentary hasn't acted as much of an inducement to make time for more. The fact that I'm not part of the scifi committee anymore, and that I therefore don't feel I need to become as broadly knowledgeable about SF and horror films as possible, has also surprisingly revealed that much of the time I'd prefer to read a book instead.

Anyway, MST3K has turned into its modern incarnation Rifftrax. Rather than having to buy the rights for films they show, with Rifftrax they simply record an alternate commentary track, and leave it up to you to synch it with your own copy of the film. This means, unlike before, they're free to mock anything, especially recent blockbusters.

This has turned out to be a good way to dodge the voice in my head saying, "Why do you want to waste two hours of your life seeing something you've already seen before when you could finally get around to whittling down the list of films you haven't seen already?" I am now able to answer, "Because sometimes after a successful four hour writing binge, I want something stuffed with soulless CGI and unfathomable scripting to sneer at. And if I have extra jokes and snide remarks filling the gaps between dialogue, it's like I'm watching a different film. Honest."

So far I've been using it to revisit films I initially thought were good, but haven't seen in a while and in the meantime multiple critics have panned them. And the critics have largely been right. T3 really is little more than a carbon copy of T2 with less believable plotting and hollower action sequences. And since the series is fraught with time travel paradoxes, it seems appropriate that the human characters' motivations are paradoxically nonsensical, varying wildly from scene to scene.

As for Daredevil, I don't know what I was thinking. Daredevil himself is a joke. His lawyer abilities seem to extend to little more than, "Did you commit this crime?" "No." "...Dammit." His blind man routine contains so many sight-requiring gags, even before his duel in the park, that it makes anyone who thinks he's blind an idiot. Now he could have gotten away with this if the film as a whole was in a lighter vein, but with the rest of the film trying so hard to be 'angsty and brooding superhero' with vague pretensions of noir, it felt completely incongruous.

In fact, a lot of it felt like multiple scripts had been meshed together. There was the initial attempt to paint him as a lethal vigilante*, Punisher-style, but aside from a few out of place "I'm not the bad guy" protestations, the 'hero as cold blooded murderer' was ignored. I suppose his sudden love with Elektra takes as long to blossom as many movie romances, but I'm still taking marks off.** And then there's the ludicrous cane-turns-into-billy-club, and trying to portray him as a dark and brooding figure whilst clad in the shiniest red mirth-inducing spandex they could find...

...There was going to be a point, but I'll leave that for another time. (Evidently I should only try running across the city if I can submerge myself in a bath of ice cubes afterwards. I'm getting tired of this 'high ambient temperature' thing. Maybe I should go live in Seattle after all.)

( Read more if you want more... )

Starring the Sixth Doctor (Colin Baker) and Peri.

Yes, the title really is "...ish." You can tell from the title it's going to be odd. Even with that warning, it's still one of the least conventional adventures so far, and one who's best medium is definitely as an audio alone. There isn't a rubber-suited monster (in fact no physical monster at all), there isn't any (real or threatened) physical conflict between any characters, and the cast is really only five members large. In fact, it's almost all just talking.

Given these limitations, it's incredible that the resulting story is still very entertaining. As for the plot, the Doctor and Peri arrive at the opening release of the Lexicon, the far-future dictionary compiling every English word ever used and every definition... and then I'm not entirely sure what's going on. There's a supposed suicide by one of the five, all the extras outside of the main five lose their language skills and can only say, "Ish," there's stuff about the ultimate word, and meaning, and the rapacity of the English language... I have a feeling if I tried to make sense of the wider plot, it'd all fall apart.

But that's not really the point. In a way it's not about what's ultimately being said, it's how they said it. When properly scripted Colin Baker is easily the most deliciously loquacious Doctor, his arrogant pretensions of grandeur (and subsequent deflatings by his companions) are a joy to listen to when we aren't being distracted by his onscreen coat-of-many-eyewatering-colours.

The script gives Colin Baker plenty of juciy and playfully sesquepedalian lines, and he handles them all with aplomb. Peri also happens to be an especially good match for him. In an adventure when the Doctor's over the top, classical-reference-stuffed dialogue is emphasised, the more obvious companion would be someone less literate, someone who dismisses his vocal meanderings as a waste of hot air.

This adventure takes a less obvious tack. Peri's always been the Sixth Doctor's equal argumentatively; by playing up her botanist background (almost never seen), she's also portrayed as something of an equal to the Doctor intellectually. She's represented as sufficiently similar to the Doctor in many ways that their differences become more pronounced, which can be a lot more effective than a complete contrast between two characters. In this case it's her American accent and language that drives the Doctor crazy, declaiming she's butchering English, whilst providing her with a good way of keeping her dialogue intelligent yet different. It even becomes a plot point at the end.

In summary: good fun.