Yee-haw, it’s time for the true March Madness!!!
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IMAGE OF THE WEEK
Cover image to Wonder Woman #189.
I’ve always liked Wonder Woman, although she seems to perpetually be ignored in favor of other DC superheroes — Superman, Batman, et cetera. With all of the superhero movies being made these days, I’d love to see a Wonder Woman film — perhaps starring Julia Roberts. She’s got the hair for WW, although she’d have to dye it. A red-headed WW just wouldn’t do.
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I’ve changed my mind on my upcoming hiatus during the move. I’ll be taking the break after next Tuesday, not after today, as earlier reported. (This doesn’t guarantee that I’ll be posting each day from this day to that, however.)
(And those Attack of the Presidents posts will resume after the move, just so I have something to do between rounds of unpacking boxes.)
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I just re-read Lord Foul’s Bane, the first volume in Stephen R. Donaldson’s classic fantasy trilogy, The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever (which was eventually followed by another trilogy, The Second Chronicles of Thomas Covenant). This was a favorite fantasy series of mine since I first read it when I was in seventh grade — in fact, I read the Covenant books before I read The Lord of the Rings, strangely enough.
Thomas Covenant is a successful writer whose life crumbles when he is diagnosed with leprosy. His wife leaves him, taking his son with her; his town basically turns him into a pariah, with people literally running from him whenever they recognize him; he loses all sense of touch in his fingers and toes; and to prevent the spread of gangrene after a cut, the fourth and fifth fingers of his right hand are amputated. Covenant lives on, then, almost out of habit and raw bitterness. And then, after a strange encounter with a beggar, Covenant is transported to another world, called “the Land”. The people of the Land are threatened by their ancient enemy, Lord Foul the Despiser, and Covenant is thrust into the center of this struggle, because he wears a wedding ring made of white gold — a metal not found in the Land, which is said to be able to release “wild magic” — and because the people of the Land view him as the reincarnation of their greatest hero, Berek Halfhand — who likewise was missing two fingers.
The various fantasy struggles in the book — the ancient villain risen again to threaten the peaceful kingdom, the forces of good who are substantially less powerful than their forebears, the pastoral peoples whose lives are disrupted by evil — are all standard fantasy tropes that will be familiar to any reader with any experience at all in the genre. What sets the Covenant Chronicles apart is its hero, who is so tinged with shades of gray that at times he becomes anti-hero, baldly refusing — frequently out of selfishness — to do the right thing, the thing we want him to do. Covenant is one of the most complex and memorable characters I have ever encountered, in any genre; his fragile grip on his own sanity defines the books, as he not only cannot bring himself to act on the Land’s behalf, but he cannot bring himself to commit to believing in the Land in the first place.
Covenant-the-leper is thrust into this world, with its frequent metaphors relating to health, and it nearly drives him mad. Early on he suffers a few scrapes and bruises; these are treated with a healing mud called “hurtloam”, which actually regenerates his dead nerves and restores his feeling in his extremities. Each person Covenant encounters in the Land seems to have no idea whatsoever what he is talking about when he speaks of disease; the very idea of “unhealth” is totally alien to them. He goes from a world where he is pariah to a world where he is revered almost at sight, and very early on it drives him over a certain edge as he commits a vile act that colors just about everything he does afterward. It is this act which establishes Covenant as anti-hero, and it’s probably this one act that makes the book — indeed, the entire series — a “love it or hate it” affair.
Reading Lord Foul’s Bane again after a long time — it’s been ten years since I last read it — was a fascinating experience. I was captivated anew by the Land, and I felt even more strongly Covenant’s struggle even as I wished he would commit, one way or the other. Donaldson’s skill at description is also as good as I remember; his fantasy world is as effectively visualized as any. His characters are memorable as well, not just Covenant — the Lords, for example, or the Giant, Saltheart Foamfollower. I do sometimes feel as if the Land isn’t as “populated” as it should be. That’s probably not a very good way of putting it, but the Land just doesn’t seem to have the vastness of, say, Middle-Earth.
I also noticed, this time, some very clunky prose by Donaldson. The story is eminently able to overcome it, so it’s not that big a fault, but Donaldson’s attempts at poetry here really don’t work. Some of them are intended to be reverential chants, some are ritual songs, others are epic tales; most of them, though, take the form of prose broken up to look like poems, with almost no attention paid whatsoever to rhyme schemes, scansion, or anything else. Of course, I am no expert on poetry, despite my little “Poetical Excursions”. I have it on pretty good authority that Tolkien’s poetry in LOTR isn’t very good, and yet I love it; so I suppose Donaldson’s poetry in The Covenant Chronicles is great stuff. But somehow I doubt it: the effect, to my ears, was no unlike that episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation when Data attempts writing poetry and ends up with verse about his cat’s “taxonomic nomenclature”.
I also have to report something that’s become a pet peeve of mine: Donaldson is one of those writers (or perhaps he was, since the Covenant series is over 25 years old now) who insists on avoiding said in his dialog attribution. Characters in Lord Foul’s Bane never “say” anything; they’re constantly “jerking out” or “grating out” or “growling” their utterances, and at one point there is a particularly unfortunate one: a character actually “ejaculates” a sentence. Ouch. So where one can read Tolkien just for the glory of his language, that approach really doesn’t work with Donaldson. He’s much more concerned with character in general, and internal struggle in particular, so his work has to be appraised on that basis.
Time was when I would have moved right into the second book, The Illearth War, but I’m not going to do that just now. Mainly, because I want to try breaking up the series a bit, and appraising each book separately (the Covenant books lend themselves to this much more than does LOTR). And also, well — my copy of Illearth War is already in a box.
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There’s not much that I can say in tribute, but it saddens me that my former Senator, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, died yesterday. I didn’t agree with him all the time — when I understood what he was talking about, that is — but he was the kind of person we should aspire to have in our Government.
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I apologize for my silence over the last three days, which was brought on by the unfortunate confluence of being out of town Monday to find an apartment (we found one, bigger than the one we live in now), a focus on putting all of my stuff back into boxes, and generally having not a whole lot to say anyway. I think that’s because I’m generally preoccupied with moving, and the world seems to be generally preoccupied with the war in Iraq, which I’m avoiding like the plague on TV. NPR’s programming seems to be “All War, All the Time”, so I’m not listening to much NPR right now. I’m avoiding war coverage for a number of reasons: I don’t care for the idea of watching a war on TV, especially in as sanitized a fashion as this one appears to be receiving; and I’m frankly focused on the stuff that’s really going on in my life right now. (Although, this turns out to be the worst possible time for my subscription to TIME Magazine to lapse….I’ll re-up in a couple of weeks, after the move is complete.)
I reject the idea that life is to be put on hold while the war is going on. There is little, if anything, that we can do to influence events in Iraq, either for good or ill, and it does little good for all of us to do nothing but watch and worry. There are still books to be read and written, music to hear, films to view, walks to take, games to be played with children, and lives to be led.
And while I’m on the subject, I have to note that while I found Michael Moore’s behavior at the Oscars boorish, I’m have to note once again the almost pathological hatred some people on the right have toward Hollywood in general. Reading this post by Rachel Lucas — someone whom I generally like even though I agree with about six percent of what she says — I just have to wonder just where on earth all that anger toward Hollywood comes from. First of all, I guess one can certainly think it inappropriate to have the Academy Awards ceremony at all this year, although it’s been pointed out elsewhere that if they held the Awards during World War II, how could they not hold them during this war, which nobody — left or right — thinks is likely to last even one-tenth as long as that war did. I also note that a lot of folks on the right express their anger at Hollywood for failing to cancel the Oscars, and yet I’ve not read a single post anywhere, by anyone, expressing the view that the NCAA Basketball Tournament should be called off. So I think we have a case of “I hate liberals, and Hollywood is ninety-five percent liberal, so I want Hollywood to be embarrassed and inconvenienced to as great a degree as possible.”
Yes, Rachel, the “show” must go on. To do otherwise would be disrespectful of all those men and women who we’re told are fighting in the name of a culture that allows such shows in the first place.
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Wow, Rachel, he really is an ass-hat!!
(As far as I am concerned, no person who very loudly and vocally supported Ralph Nader and helped fuel the incredible hostility toward Al Gore has any right to complain about the 2000 election. As for the war, well — there’s a damn time and place. I’m all for free speech. I’m also for, well, being polite.)
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As much as the physical labor of moving sucks — all the cleaning, all the packing, the constant smell of corrugated cardboard, the reduction of a somewhat-orderly home to what seems like a hopeless clutter — what’s infinitely worse is when your three-year-old daughter realizes that today was the last time she’ll get to play with the kids at the Sunday School you just started taking her to a few months ago. I moved a lot as a kid, so I’m in a weird double position: I know that “You’ll make lots of new friends” is pretty much true, but I also know that “You’ll make lots of new friends” is also of absolutely no consolation when you’re about to leave the current friends behind. In all likelihood she will have forgotten these kids’ names by Christmas, but she knows their names now, and three-year-olds are notable for not having yet figured out how to mask their heartbreak.
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Notes on the War:
:: A lot of bloggers I read have commented on the sanitary aspects of our media’s coverage of the war, with special focus on CNN’s coverage. I’m told it sometimes borders on “cheerleading”, and the coverage is strangely insistent on showing war-from-a-distance: bombs erupting, loud booms rolling across the Iraqi landscape, et cetera. I don’t have cable, and I’m really watching as little of it as possible — I’m becoming more and more prejudiced toward the written word these days — but I’ve been referred to some very disturbing images on Al’Jazeera. (I mean it. These images are graphic. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.)
This is the side of war our media almost never shows us.
The language of war is necessarily loaded with terms designed to dehumanize the business, but when I see some of the language out there that not only advocates war, but celebrates it — when I see it becoming an entertainment that we plop down to watch, much as we would to watch Survivor or the World Series — I think we need to force ourselves to look at images like this, and remind ourselves that real human beings are dying horrible, violent deaths, on both sides of the conflict.
I am not a pacifist, and I think there is moral justification for this war (as I’ve said before, what scares me is not the war but our Administration squandering that moral justification afterwards and my suspicion of less-than-moral motives at the heart of it). But I can’t help but feel a bit nihilistic about a world where such things are as common as they are here.
:: But if the pro-war side gets too heady in its enthusiasm, the anti-war side has its own underbelly and it’s just as gross. I’ve been advocating an end to anti-war demonstrations, mainly because they’re pretty much irrelevant now; by continually protesting the war, we lose focus on the fact of the post-war world, which is where the success of this war will ultimately lie. But another, smaller reason I advocate ending the demonstrations is to shut up people like this. I can’t help but note that the guy holding up that sign, on the right-hand side, is wearing a ski-mask.
:: Finally, I found a bit of humor in the BBC’s airing of the minutes leading up to President Bush’s address to the nation the other night. I’ve wondered why Bush doesn’t address the nation from his Oval Office desk more; earlier last week he did it from what I think was the East Room at the White House (I could be wrong), and other addresses have come at other locations, most notably his address regarding his decision on stem-cell research, which seemed to come from his kitchen in Crawford, Texas. But what I found funny here is not that Bush would have a stylist primping him a bit, but that she’s so diligently primping the back of his head, which we would never have seen. Did she shine his shoes, too?
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I plan to watch the Oscars tonight, at least as late as I can. (I haven’t managed to stay up all the way to “Best Picture” since Braveheart won.) Of this year’s Best Picture nominees, I’ve only seen The Two Towers, which has no chance of winning, really. I recently read somewhere — but I don’t recall where, specifically — a theory that the Academy is waiting until The Return of the King next year to shower its accolades upon Peter Jackson, which I hope is the case. I don’t have much of a read on any of the Oscar races this year, so I’m mainly hoping for an enjoyable and entertaining telecast. (I’m also glad that Steve Martin is hosting again, because I never really cared for Whoopi Goldberg’s brand of humor at the Oscars. Of course, it’s worth bearing in mind that I actually enjoyed David Letterman’s now-infamous turn at hosting the ceremonies. Yeah, he did beat “Oprah, Uma” into the ground, but I loved it when he drafted Tom Hanks for help in a “Stupid Pet Trick”.)
Roger Ebert has a good article about his Oscar memories today. My personal favorite Oscar memories:
:: Clint Eastwood presenting the “Best Director” award to Steven Spielberg for Schindler’s List. Eastwood lost the teleprompter, and you could just see the words, “Oh, God damn it!” forming on his lips before he got back on track.
:: Robin Williams’s speech after winning “Best Supporting Actor” for Good Will Hunting.
:: David Letterman to the Academy President (I can’t remember the guy’s name), after the President’s opening speech: “Sir, there are some guys out back who’d like to talk to you about Hoop Dreams….”
:: Randy Newman, addressing the orchestra that was beginning to play, ushering Newman off the stage after he’d finally won an Oscar for “Best Song” after losing oh, so many times: “Oh, you’re not going to play now. Please don’t play.”
:: Jim Carrey, the year he was denied a nomination for The Truman Show: “I’m here to present [some award], and that’s all I’m here for.” Also, a few years prior when, in presenting a different award, he referred to the Oscar as “the LORD of all knick-knacks!”