Month: November 2002

Thirty-nine years ago today, President Kennedy was shot in Dallas by either a lone gunman firing from the sixth floor of the Texas Schoolbook Depository building, or by a team of snipers including a gunman behind the fence on the grassy knoll, or blanks were shot into the air and Kennedy then made a secret escape to the hills above Buenos Aires, where he lived to old age in anonymity and seclusion. I’ve never really formulated my own beliefs on the assassination; I find the idea of a conspiracy seductive, but the case is not entirely convincing. (Of course, the case for a lone gunman is not entirely convincing, either, which is the whole problem anyway.)

The Kennedy assassination is one of history’s greatest “What if” moments, as in, “What if things had happened differently?” What if Kennedy had survived? Would Viet Nam still have happened? Would Nixon’s rise to power have occurred? I don’t know, but it’s interesting to consider the possibilities.

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A hypothetical transcript of a foreign policy briefing for President Bush can be found over on William Burton’s blog. I found this quite amusing. (I didn’t take it as making fun of Bush, but rather using the name of our current President to riff on a classic comedy routine. But, if you’re offended, just pretend that it’s a President Gore and whoever he would have made his National Security Advisor talking.)

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It’s time for a progress report on the Space Elevator. I really do hope that I get to see this in my lifetime, although I’m concerned about the security of such a project. This would surely be one of the most tempting objects in the world for terrorist activity, and if Kim Stanley Robinson’s depiction in Red Mars of what a space elevator crashing to the planet is accurate, I’d be very frightened indeed.

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IMAGE OF THE WEEK

Tintagel, Cornwall, Great Britain.

Continuing my brief tour of British sites important to the Arthurian legend — and, therefore, to the novel I’m writing — we have this photograph of Tintagel. This spit of land, connected to the mainland by a very narrow spit of land, is the legendary birthplace of King Arthur himself — in the castle whose ruins still occupy the island.

As the legend tells, King Uther Pendragon fought a war against some British Lords. He was at a feast following a victory when he caught the eye of Igraine, the wife of one of his staunchest allies, Duke Gorlois of Cornwall, who dwelt in Tintagel Castle. Uther ordered Gorlois to give him Igraine, but Gorlois refused and fled the meadhall to return to his castle. A new war began, this between the former friends Uther and Gorlois.

While the war went on, Merlyn came to Uther and helped him gain entrance to the castle by using a magic spell to make Uther take on the appearance of Gorlois, so that Igraine would think it was her husband just returning from battle and coming to bed. Thus Uther took Igraine, not knowing as he did so that on the nearby battlefield Gorlois had been struck down and killed. So when Uther got Igraine with child, the child was illegitimate. When it was born — a boy, named Arthur — he was given to Merlyn to raise. All that happened here, on Tintagel.

One of my dreams is to travel to Britain and see at last all of the places that I’ve been writing about.

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In children’s literature, it sometimes seems that the lines of good and evil are very clearly drawn, in classic “Western” style: the good guys where white, the bad guys wear black, the innocent scurry to get out of the main street lest they get shot. This is illustrated, to give one big example, in the Harry Potter books. Whatever the charms of J.K. Rowling’s novels — and there are charms a plenty in them — moral ambiguity is not one of them. (I’m talking real moral ambiguity here, of the type where what is right and what is wrong are blurred and when right can possibly arise from wrong and vice versa; not the “mistaken identity” or “evil in disguise” that is a common thread in the Potter works.) There is a Dark Lord, and a host of heroic figures arrayed in opposition to him, and that’s that.

But the lines are not so clearly drawn in many other works of children’s lit. One of the finest examples is Lloyd Alexander’s Westmark trilogy. This series tells the story of a kingdom whose monarchy is controlled by corrupt forces, and whose populace is slowly moving toward revolution. It is almost a French Revolution story, except that it doesn’t occur in France; it occurs in the fantasy realm of Westmark. A young printer’s assistant named Theo is working in a time when the presses are being told by the government what to print or, even worse, shut down entirely. Theo’s master is killed by the King’s men after he prints something he shouldn’t have, and Theo flees. He then encounters two roaming criminals, a ragtag group of university students led by a particularly charismatic man who has revolutionary thoughts brewing in his mind, and a girl with a hidden past. As would be expected of such a story, moral questions arise constantly: if the monarchy is failing, do the people have the right to do away with it, or the responsibility to repair it? Are men to be given self-rule? And, most importantly, is it ever right to take the life of another, even in the pursuit of the most lofty goals?

Alexander’s books address these questions, and many like them. Easy answers are not forthcoming, but in a way that is more satisfying than if they were. The books are not merely studies in morality, though — they are rollicking tales of war and deceit, adventure and mayhem, crime and revolution. If the plots rely a bit heavily on coincidence of the “chance encounter with some unnamed character early in the book turns out to be a crucial event because of who that character was” variety, it can be forgiven on the grounds that everything else in them works so well. Alexander has always been best known for his wonderful Prydain Chronicles, an epic fantasy based in part on the Welsh epic The Mabinogion, but Westmark is almost as good.

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I’m a PC person, mainly because it’s what I’m used to. I don’t get particularly worked up when Windows crashes — which isn’t nearly as often, in my case, as it is apparently for others — and I’ve never had a significant hardware problem. I’ve never had to crack open the CPU box and mess around with cards and whatnot. I’m on my second computer in five years, and that’s because the first one just got too old. It didn’t have enough memory, and the Web has finally reached a point where a 28K modem is not only slow but simply insufficient. (I’m on a 56K modem right now, which is sufficient for my needs. I don’t do a lot of downloading of movies and video files, nor do I engage in music trading.)

However, it’s hard not to feel occasionally inferior after listening to Mac users — especially given the current Mac advertising campaign, which is basically this: “Dump your PC, ya dope!” The prevailing meme is that Macs are clearly the better machine, and it’s only through a mass delusion on the part of the public and a conspiratorial manipulation of the marketplace by Microsoft that PCs are dominant. (Come to think of it, that’s not unlike the recent Democratic Party campaign strategy.) So, as a PC user who is currently happy as a clam with his machine, I’m generally glad to read Steven Den Beste’s regular shots across the Macintosh bow. Much of it goes straight over my head, but I found the recent post of his — on Mac virus security — especially fascinating. He argues, in short, that virus-writers devote their energies to probing Windows for security holes, because Windows and PC systems are so prevalent. The resulting lack of viruses attacking Macs is mistaken for superior Mac virus security. What we have here, Steven argues, is an example of the old fallacy: “Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.”

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There is an interesting and rather creepy post over on S. L. Viehl’s blog StarLines about the letters authors receive in the mail…and the fact that some of them come from convicts serving out their sentences. I like reading StarLines because Sheila shares a lot of details about what it’s really like to be a writer, the day to day minutiae that fill a writer’s life, a lot of which I have never before considered because I’ve never realized that it needed to be considered. This is one such example. Normal writer website advice tends to run along the lines of, “Write every day”, “Be prepared for lots of rejection”, “Read read read” et cetera — all valuable and essential advice, to be sure. But I’m really thankful that Sheila is out there to provide advice along the lines of “Prepare for the day when convicted murderers read your work”.

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I’ve never cared much for those big Biblical epics they used to make — films like The Ten Commandments and The Greatest Story Ever Told. They always strike me as overwrought spectacles, with the actors within them Emoting! Every! Word! Because! It’s! All! So! Important!! Every gesture becomes exaggerated hugely, every emotion is felt deeply, every line of dialogue is followed by an exchange of serious glances. In truth, the only thing that I ever really like about these movies is the music. Some of the greatest filmscores ever written come from the Biblical epics: Alex North’s Cleopatra, Alfred Newman’s The Greatest Story Ever Told, Miklos Rozsa’s King of Kings. (OK, Cleopatra probably isn’t actually a Biblical epic….)

Yesterday I finally managed to get through Ben-Hur in its entirety. I’ve seen it in bits-and-pieces over the years, but never from start to finish, and I’ve owned the score album for a while now. (The Rhino Records release of the Ben-Hur score, on two CDs with a lavishly illustrated booklet and copious liner notes, is one of the classiest film score releases I’ve ever seen.) I found the film in the local library’s video collection, and figured, Hey, why not? I ended up being fairly surprised at how much I enjoyed the film.

I still observed some of the flaws I’ve observed in other Biblical epics: scenes that go on too long, overacting, spectacle-for-the-sake-of-spectacle, occasionally stilted dialogue. But I found a lot more in Ben-Hur to enjoy. Without going into the film too deeply, what struck me most was the way the story is structured so that the life of Judah Ben-Hur occasionally intersected the life of “a young Rabbi from Nazareth”, and the way that Ben-Hur is constantly aware of something larger happening, that the events of his life are mirroring other events that are to change the world although he knows not how. I liked how the religious elements of the film are muted, so that our focus is constantly on Ben-Hur’s reactions to them rather than on the events themselves. The film never shows Jesus directly — he is not even named — and yet his presence is felt all through the film, a bit of subtlety in a film genre that was never known for subtlety.

I also admired the film’s pacing. Most Biblical epics, I have found, are the cinematic equivalent of Christmas fruitcake: heavy, leaden things that are digested for very long periods of time. Ben-Hur, though, somehow manages the feat of seeming shorter than it really is, by keeping the focus on Ben-Hur himself and his journey to revenge and redemption. The pacing isn’t perfect, of course; the scenes of Ben-Hur as a galley slave go on and on, and the film comes dangerously close to grinding to a halt after the chariot race, but the film does not bog down nearly as much and not remotely as often as other Biblical epics.

Ben-Hur isn’t a perfect movie, by any means, but I was surprised by how much I liked it, considering that it is part of a genre that usually makes my eyes glaze over and my hand grope for the nearest book or magazine.

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James Coburn has sadly passed. He’ll be missed.

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Sometimes when I sign on to Blogger, I’ll check one or two of the “Most Recently Published” blogs in the sidebar before starting work on Byzantium’s Shores. So I glanced at this blog, and now I’m thinking: what on Earth is happening to written English? I’m generally forgiving of spelling errors, and I’m willing to overlook the occasional grammatical hiccup, but reading things like this particular blog make me wonder just what is going on with our language, as the spelling and grammar — such as they are — are so consistent as to suggest that it’s intentional. Is this something of a new, urban-style dialect? Is English evolving apace, as it has for centuries? It’s taken centuries to get to the point where readers of English need to have the earliest works in their own language — Beowulf, say — translated for readability, but now it seems to be happening in a time-frame better measured in individual years.

Or, is this just another bit of evidence that we’re simply gathering up our standards and tossing them out with yesterday’s newspaper?

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