Month: November 2002

My referral log today reveals that someone came here looking for results of the Buffalo Bills and the Kansas City Chiefs in 1990. Assuming that this person wants to know the results of a game that year between the Bills and Chiefs, here’s the answer: there was no game in 1990 between the Bills and Chiefs. They did meet in 1991, though, in a Monday night game from Kansas City which the Bills lost, 33-6. Later on that year, the two teams met in the second round of the playoffs — the Chiefs were a wildcard team, whilst the Bills were the AFC top seed — at Rich Stadium (now Ralph Wilson Stadium), with the Bills winning 37-14.

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We adults — especially those of us lumped into “Generation X” — may lament the wonderful children’s TV shows that were on when we were kids, shows like Electric Company and Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood (still on, but no longer in production). But there are some really fine shows out there these days, primarily on PBS. (Note to Republicans: Don’t even think of trying to kill PBS, the way you did last time you swept the mid-terms!) These are a couple of new favorites in our household:

:: Caillou. This is a show about a four-year-old boy named Caillou (pronounced “Kye-you”, some kind of French name) and his family. What I like about this show is the way it depicts a normal family and the normal things that Caillou learns about as he goes through life. I haven’t yet figured out, though, why Caillou is bald when everyone else in his family — including little sister Rosie — have full heads of hair.

:: Between the Lions. Now this is a clever show. Aimed at literacy and hosted by some muppet-like lions, the show has a number of clever recurring segments like “Gawain’s Word” (“Wayne’s World”, get it?) in which an armored knight unveils a new word, and a segment featuring “The Word Doctor: Dr. Ruth Wordheimer”, starring the real Dr. Ruth. There’s good stuff here.

:: Liberty’s Kids. This one’s a bit over-the-head of our three-year-old, but she still likes it. It’s set during the Revolutionary War and tells the story of a trio of kids who are journalists for a newspaper done by Ben Franklin (voiced, utterly appropriately, by Walter Cronkite). The show actually examines some of the issues in the American Revolution, at a fun and basic level.

There are a bunch of other good shows out there as well. TV for kids isn’t all about Pokemon and the Disney Channel, so check out PBS!!

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Announcement.

Over on Collaboratory we’re about to launch a group-read of The Brothers Karamazov by Dostoyevski. I’m not sure how soon we’ll be starting, but I assume we’ll finalize things by early next week. The translations currently in use are this one and this one.

Front-page posting on Collaboratory is members-only, although we’re on the constant prowl for more members. The site is a kind-of “MetaFilter Lite”, although much cooler. (Well, it would have to be, wouldn’t it?) Posting on the comments, though, is totally public. So, if anyone would like to join us in reading Brothers K, come along for the ride! I’m pretty excited about this, because I’ve never dabbled much in Russian literature (using “not much” in the sense of, “not at all”).

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Artist Ted Nasmith, who is particularly notable for his Tolkien-related illustrations, now has an official website. I love Nasmith’s work, but the website — in its initial launch — is in dire need of some tweaking. The thing extends off the edge of the browser window, with no way to scroll that I can discern. But what can be seen of Nasmith’s paintings are beautiful.

(Crossposted to Collaboratory.)

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I’ve been waffling a while on whether I wanted to do this, but I figured, oh, what the hey. What follows is the opening of my novel-in-progress, The Promised King, Book One: The Welcomer. Comments are always welcome.

:: CHAPTER ONE ::

In the first of the dreams that Gwynwhyfar would remember, she was a bird flying above the sea.

***

Over the waves she flew, the spray from the wind-driven waves splashing upon the underside of her body. Below her, beneath the surface of the water, she saw a pod of dolphins racing with the waves, periodically leaping up into the air and then back down into the sea. Then a huge gray shape formed beneath the waters; it was the great gray body of a whale rising from the depths. The whale broke the surface of the water and blasted spray into the air from a hole on the back of its head. It then plunged down again into the deep. A sudden darkness fell, and she turned to see where the sun had gone. The clouds were gathering behind her, great black storm clouds she prayed that she could outpace. She turned and flew again, speeding in a direction that she hoped would take her away from the mustering storm.


Ahead of her there appeared an island, thirty leagues long and twenty wide. She dropped down until she was just skimming the surface. The waters around the island were clear as glass, and beneath them she caught glimpses of schools of many-colored fish cavorting amidst the underwater reefs. There were sharks too, including one that tried to snatch her from the sky, but she was too fast. The beaches that ringed the island were marked by sand as white as snow. The island was green and verdant, and she found herself flying over orchards of apple trees.


There was a city of alabaster buildings and wide streets paved with white stone, but she saw no people. The city appeared to be utterly deserted, even as she flew over a building that was clearly a place of worship. In the courtyard of this building there was a golden disc shaped to look like the moon, marking this place as a temple to the Goddess. After the temple she flew over a long series of grasslands and then into the hilly country. At last she was flying over the three great mountains that rose from the center of the island into the sky. Their heights soared above where she could fly, and their peaks were covered with snow. Soon she was flying back down toward the sea on the other side of the island where there were dense forests of pine, and in these forests she looked for shelter from the coming storm.


There was thunder then, impossibly close behind her. She turned and, hovering above the trees, saw that the three mountains had exploded with fire and smoke in great columns that tore the sky asunder. And then the storm came, and she again flew away, trying to escape the fire and rain and smoke and wind. She flew over the island’s other beaches and again out to sea, but her strength was not enough by any measure, and she was driven down, down toward the boiling waters. Rivers of liquid rock streamed down from the mountaintops, and the island of green beauty, the island of apples, crumbled and sank beneath her into the depths of the sea. The storm raged around her, finally striking her down into the sea itself. Waves crashed over her, and in a flash her strength was gone. The water was cold, very very cold and she gasped for air as the winds howled and the waves mounted.


As the last wave towered above her, she glimpsed something out away from her, something golden….and then the waves took her down, down to the bottom of the sea.

***

“Gwyn! Gwyn! Wake up!”

Someone shook her, not exactly gently but not very roughly either, and she opened her eyes. The dream was still with her; usually her dreams vanished with a quick awakening, but this one had been far more vivid than any she’d had before. She shook her head to dispel the image and looked up into Brother Malcolm’s eyes.

:: To Be Continued ::

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Now that I have arrived at The Climax of the novel-in-progress, I’ve realized something either cool or disconcerting: I’m writing a George Lucas-style climax. This is a climax where the action is taking place in three (or more) different locations, and I’m switching back and forth among them. I have a huge battle taking place outside a city; I have a smaller battle taking place at Stonehenge; and I have my heroine embarking on her mystical journey to Avalon to fetch King Arthur. The problem with such a complex climax is sequencing: first, I have to identify the order in which each event happens, or at least the order in which each event has to be shown. It’s not necessarily the case that events occur in the order that they are shown, but they have to come in a certain narrative order to work together if tension is to be properly built so that when the Big Heroic Moment finally arrives, it actually feels like a Big Heroic Moment and that it’s not anticlimactic, coming so late in the proceedings that the reader’s reaction is “OK, I get it”, as opposed to “Wow!”.

The prime problem that I’m having is that the heroine’s “mystical journey” is just that, and as such it kind of takes place outside the general timeframe of the other events. I’m afraid that if I include her journey in the cutting back-and-forth between the other places of action, I’ll be forced to establish a framework in which that journey exists, and I don’t want to do that. So what I’m leaning toward doing is sending her on her journey, and then moving the other two scenes along until their “pregnant moment” — and at that point I’ll cut to what the heroine is doing, which may take an entire chapter in itself. What to do once her journey is complete is not an issue; I could write that stuff in my sleep. So I think I know what to do, and my concern now is simply that I don’t want to bore the reader with the “mystical journey” stuff.

Anyway, time to pick up the pen.

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An interesting take on Harry Potter appeared on Slate the other day. The basic gyst of the article is that although all of the action of the books (and now the movies) revolves around Harry Potter, young Harry himself doesn’t really do anything to influence that action on his own. He seems to coast through his various problems and antagonisms, achieving his victories more through his own inate abilities than through his own actions. Everything that happens to him, does so because of who Harry Potter IS rather than because of what he DOES. It’s an interesting take, and to a degree I agree with it. I’ve noticed, even as the books have gotten darker and better, that everyone in the supporting cast — all of the people around Harry — are more interesting, as characters, than Harry himself. I hope that changes in the remaining books.

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I don’t have too much to say about football this week, primarily because the Bills did not play. Their bye week mercifully came immediately after the shellacking they received courtesy of the Patriots, so they could lick their wounds and maybe practice a bit on defense and get ready for what remains of their schedule. Notes on yesterday’s action:

:: The AFC East is now a logjam, with the Dolphins, Patriots and Bills all at 5-4, and the J-E-T-S JetsJetsJetsJets still alive at 4-5. That said, it’s starting to look like it’s another year for the Pats, I’m sorry to say. The Bills have been overachieving, and with them heading into the tough part of their schedule I expect their defensive weaknesses to finally prove fatal. The Dolphins are in free-fall, and we’re not even in December yet, which is when the Dolphins usually collapse. The Jets may have some surprise left in them, but right now the Pats are the most experienced and best coached team in the division. Ugh, but that seems to be the lay of the land.

:: Neither of my Super Bowl picks won yesterday, although at least the Steelers didn’t lose, either — they blew a big lead and came away with that rarest of NFL results, a tie. (I find it interesting that a tie occurred in the NFL so soon after a lot of public discussion as to whether the NFL should abandon sudden-death OT in favor of the college system.) The Eagles, though, got clobbered at home by the Colts in a game that featured four former Syracuse University players. Philadelphia is still leading the division, but they are well behind in the hunt for home-field advantage, which actually matters in the NFC. The Steelers are also leading their division, but it’s a crappy division, so it’s hard to gauge them accordingly.

:: The Rams are looking like the Rams these days, instead of the Bengals. Weird. I’ll be interested to see what happens in the off-season this year, as I would expect other teams to be interested in Marc Bulger. I don’t know if the Rams will make the playoffs — they still would need to go 6-1 the rest of the way to have a real shot — but they may finish up 8-8, which given their 0-5 start would appear miraculous. Of course, Mike Martz may end up getting a lot of the credit, which may not be a good thing.

:: The Vikings are 2-7. They benched Culpepper yesterday, but they nearly rallied for a win. Their first-round pick played his first game after a long, stupid holdout. This franchise is a total mess.

:: Am I missing it entirely, or does nobody ever talk about moving the Cardinals? Why does that franchise exist, where it does? Consider: Sun Devil Stadium, where the Cards play, has a seating capacity of 73,234. Attendance at yesterday’s game (Seahawks 27, Cards 6) was 29,252. That means that the following cities could have sent every person living within their borders to the game: Jamestown, NY; Burlington, VT; Cedar Falls, IA; Hillsboro, OR. Amazing. (That’s based on 1990 population figures, though — I couldn’t find any 2000 numbers. But I didn’t look very hard.)

:: If the Packers get home-field throughout the playoffs, fuhgeddaboudit.

:: Speaking of the Packers: on his “Two Minute Drill” segment on SportsCenter last week, Chris Berman noted that the Pack excels at scoring just before halftime, which can be crucial to setting the tone of a game. Yesterday, against the Lions, they scored 14 points after the two-minute warning in the second quarter.

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You may have thought that a thesaurus, while definitely a useful item, is also inherently nerdy and clunky.

Well, think again.

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I recently read Evenings With Horowitz: A Personal Portrait, by David Dubal. This book recounts the relationship that classical musician and author Dubal formed with the great pianist Vladimir Horowitz, during the Maestro’s last years of life when he was called “The Last Romantic” and his every public performance took on the feel of a visitation by the Pontiff. It’s a very readable book, notable for its biographical portrait of Horowitz and the first-hand look we get at both the way Horowitz loomed over the classical music community and the way he was, in many ways, a mercurial and selfish man. Horowitz, like all great artists, is a very demanding soul: demanding of his art, demanding of the people in his life, demanding of himself. It has been well documented how Horowitz had to leave his native Russia after the Bolshevik revolution, never to return until 1986 when he was in his 80s; Dubal’s book recounts a lot of that, as well, but it also gives us the sense that Horowitz never formed a true sense of belonging in the American society that he eventually took as his home.

The book is episodic in structure, and at times it feels like a series of vignettes about the Maestro, some of which are frankly more interesting than others. It also ends on something of a sad note, not only with Horowitz’s death but with the fact that he and Dubal had a falling-out just months before his passing. Nevertheless, this is a fascinating account of a great musician and his relationship with a lesser musician who was no less passionate for music.

As a companion experience to reading this book, the other day I listened to my copy of Horowitz in Moscow, the recording of the monumental concert Horowitz gave when he finally returned to Moscow in 1986. The recording is magical and amazing. Even if Horowitz’s Mozart Sonata (C Major, K. 330) is a bit uneven in the opening movement, the Romantic works on the disc — Romantic music forming the spine of Horowitz’s repertoire — are staggering, particularly the Scriabin Etudes, which are played in a white heat that can still be felt listening to the CD in my living room instead of in the concert hall in 1986. Horowitz in Moscow is a great recording of one of classical music’s premier events.

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