Month: May 2003

A couple of more book-and-litrichaw notes for today:

:: A writer named James Frey is apparently aspiring to some lofty heights, and using a lot of profanity in voicing those aspirations. I do want to read his book. (And come to think of it, has anyone else had the experience that people whose last name is “Frey” tend to be a little…off?)

:: SF writer Charles Stross, one of the “new wave” of Scottish writers bringing energetic writing to the genre, has an interesting article on his blog detailing his process of novel-writing and his suggestions for first-time novelists. Upon reflection of how I’ve been going about it, I’ve pretty much done none of what he suggests. My process basically boils down to, “Write the whole story, and then revise it and revise it and revise it until it no longer sucks.” Your mileage may vary.

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A long-standing bit of cultural faith is that of all the millions of people who bought copies of Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time, a small percentage thereof actually read it — most simply bought it so they could have it on their shelves and feel the vibes of brilliance cascading off it. A literary status symbol, not unlike toting around a copy of David Eggers’s A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius.

(I did read Hawking’s book. But I make this claim with the adjoining disclaimer that my most frequent utterance whilst doing so was “Huh?” I also read the Eggers volume, which I greatly enjoyed. But since I came away from it with my heart most certainly not broken, I think I missed something there, too.)

There are many reasons why we read the books we do, and there are times when we select our books as status — what we read reflects on who we are. Richard Bach once wrote, “If I want to understand someone quickly, I look at his bookshelf.” This is also true of presidential candidates, who are always selecting those books that make them look either reflective, statesmanlike, or deeply faithful. Of course, there’s nothing wrong with this per se — especially if they’re actually reading these books and not just dropping titles. But still, I’d love to hear a candidate say something like, “Well, I’m reading Lord of the Rings for the sixth time. And there’s a new cookbook out by Alton Brown that’s a hoot. I recently finished the new Tom Clancy, and I think I’m going to stop buying him in hardcover — he’s just too bloated. And say, when exactly does the new Harry Potter come out?”

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In film music geek news, composer Alan Silvestri (Back to the Future, Contact, Forrest Gump) has been released from his duties for the upcoming film Pirates of the Caribbean. This is, of course, a development of staggering bogusity. SIlvestri is a gifted composer of accessible, and yet distinctive, film music and I was really looking forward to hearing the results of his encounter with the “Big Swashbuckler” genre. Now, instead we’ll get another bland, cookie-cutter score from Hans Zimmer’s Media Ventures factory. So, yes, whoever is responsible for this decision should be made to walk the plank. Pronto. Geek mode “off”.

(And it’s my blog, so if I want to make up words like “bogusity”, I will do just that. Harumph. Where the hell is my coffee?!)

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Hey, a victory for the good guys! Kevin Drum has eclipsed Little Green Footballs on the Ecosystem. Go team!!

(But I’m still a “Crawly Amphibian”. Must….get….links….)

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I watched the last fifteen minutes or so of Alias‘s season finale last night. It was what I call a “Type II Cliffhanger”. This is a cliffhanger where the show ends just after a huge revelation is unveiled about the plot or characters, and then we’re left wondering (a) if it’s true and (b) if so, what are the implications thereof? The classic Type II Cliffhanger, of course, occurs in Star Wars Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back, when we’re left wondering, “Jeez, is Darth Vader really Luke’s father?”

TESB isn’t exclusively a Type II Cliffhanger, though; it’s actually a blend of Type II, Type III, and the more familiar Type I. Type I is simply when you leave your characters in serious jeopardy for their lives, and that’s where the word “cliffhanger” comes from in the first place. In TESB this is the freezing of Han Solo. Other notable examples are the assassination attempt that closed out the first season of The West Wing, and the X-Files episode “Anasazi”, in which we fade out with Mulder trapped in a buried and burning railroad car.

One of the most famous cliffhangers of all time, though, is the shooting of J.R. Ewing on Dallas. You might initially think this is a Type I cliffhanger, but it’s not — it’s Type III. J.R.’s survival wasn’t much in doubt (the character was by far the most popular on the show, which was then entering the height of its popularity). So what’s Type III? That’s when you either set up a mystery to be cleared up next year (or next movie), or simply leave the story unfinished. J.R.’s shooting, then, is actually known better by its mystery: “Who shot J.R.?” Likewise, TESB invokes Type III in a couple of ways — it leaves the Rebels on the verge of utter defeat, it leaves us wondering if Luke will ever become a Jedi, we wonder who “the other hope” that Yoda had mentioned earlier is, et cetera. This is all in addition to Vader’s revelation (Type II) and Han’s unresolved fate (Type I).

Which brings me to Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers. I found it funny, when the film came out, how many reviewers complained about the film’s lack of an ending. But Peter Jackson could have done even worse: he could have ended it the way the book ends. The film is Type III all the way: the final war against Mordor is being set up, and Gollum is scheming to lead Frodo and Sam into certain doom. But while most of the Type III stuff still applies in the book, when you reach the last page Gollum has already led the two Hobbits into certain doom. The book literally ends with the gates slamming shut with Sam on the outside, and the final sentence is this: “Frodo was alive but taken by the enemy.” Classic Type I, and I can imagine the howls of protest that would have erupted in theaters nationwide if Jackson had brought us to that point and then rolled the credits.

I suppose there could be a Type IV cliffhanger. This is the “accidental” cliffhanger, which exists for shows whose futures aren’t certain at the time of writing, so that the writers have to leave things open enough for subsequent plotlines if they’re renewed but settled enough for closure if they’re not. This is what happened to Ed this year, what with the “at last” admission of love between Ed and Carol Vescey. It also happened on the second-to-last season of Magnum, PI; a surreal episode involving Magnum’s death was made and televised, but then the show was suddenly renewed, so some backtracking was in order.

And that, friends, is more than you ever wanted to know.

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One of my favorite bits from the great old TV series Cheers is when Sam is planning to go out with all the regulars at the bar to watch The Magnificent Seven, but he excludes Diane. She lays a guilt trip on him, and he decides to bag the watching of the movie because he’s going to feel guilty. So everyone else decides not to bother, as well. They’re all sitting around the bar, looking depressed…when Carla sings the first couple of bars of the famous theme music to the movie. Norm joins in, then the rest of them, until they’re bellowing Elmer Bernstein’s most famous melody while they’re grabbing their coats and running out of the bar to go watch the movie after all.

I’m bringing this up, of course, because I finally watched The Magnificent Seven for the first time this weekend.

As seems to be the case with just about every classic Western I ever watch, I enjoyed it but didn’t love it as much as many others do. This is probably because the basic plot of the film, which is already cribbed from The Seven Samurai (another film I haven’t seen), seems familiar to me by now, and because I’ve never been enamored of Westerns to begin with. I loved the first third of the film, when the “seven” are coming together — especially the quiet confidence of Yul Brynner’s character. Once they get to the little village they’re trying to protect, though, I thought the film slowed down a lot, and the climax didn’t really seem to build so much as arrive.

Still, it was a fun movie. My favorite line, of course, is when one of the seven picks off a distant bad guy who’s making his escape. The guy standing next to him — the Western obligatory young guy who’s not as good with the gun as he thinks — says, “That’s the best shot I’ve ever seen”, and the shooter snaps back, “One of the worst. I was aiming for the horse.”

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A possible downside of my doing BlogRolling is that I check in after a few hours, see only a handful of “New Posts” indicators, and now I’m thinking, “You bunch of lazy dogs! Start blogging!!” Of course, then I have to remind myself that few, if any, of the people on my blogroll are unemployed freelancers.

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A careful examination of my sidebar will reveal not only the location of Jimmy Hoffa’s body (hidden in a secret code) but some other changes as well. On two of these I followed Sean‘s lead, and on the other (blogrolling) we apparently had the same thought at the same time. Weird. Or not. You decide….

:: I’m giving BlogRolling a try. This service makes maintaining my blogroll neat and painless, and also puts a little marker (this one: (^) ) beside any blogs containing new posts in the last twelve hours. I’ve also decided to list my blogroll alphabetically, instead of the pseudo-category scheme that I was using that, as it was not indicated anywhere actually in the blogroll, likely made little sense to anyone but me. (Basically, I had liberal bloggers together, right-wingers together, SF-community members and writers together, my Collaboratory cohorts together, and my arch-enemy on top. Now, it’s just a boring old egalitarian alphabetical scheme.)

:: I signed up for an RSS feed; that’s in one of the buttons toward the end of the sidebar. As of this writing it’s not yet functional, but I think I’m waiting for some kind of completion to their registration or something. Either that or I just bollixed the whole thing to begin with.

:: And I added a “GeoURL” link. This service allows you to find out which bloggers are closest to your actual, physical location. I’m not sure if this is actually useful, but hey, it looked nifty.

(BTW, that Jimmy Hoffa thing was a joke. I have no idea where his body is.)

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There’s nothing like weird sports lore: did you know that in baseball, you can be the winning pitcher without pitching to a batter?

And Kevin Drum is wondering if any sport has a greater ratio of build-up to actual event than the Kentucky Derby. I’m not sure, unless one counts a figure skater’s practice for the Olympics — four years for about six minutes of skating. But then, there are events in between such as the annual World Championships. (Actually, it’s Chad Orzel who’s wondering this, but I read about it on Kevin’s blog.)

EDIT: I dug up the box score from the game where the pitcher won a game without facing a batter. The short version of the story is that he came into the game with two outs, executed a pickoff maneuver which ended up catching a baserunner in a rundown for the third out, and then left the game. His team then scored the go-ahead runs in the next frame, giving him the win. Looking at his line, I see a goose-egg dutifully entered under his pitch count.

Oh, and I fixed the link to Mike’s article. I used the wrong permalink.

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Am I slowly going insane, or are television seasons becoming shorter by a day or two each year? I seem to recall season finales once taking place in late May, due to May sweeps, but now it’s gotten to the point where every show that I watch will have aired its season finale by May 15th, not even halfway through the month. And some of the shows that I watch — Ed, Scrubs — had their finales last month. Of course, in the case of Ed it might well have been the series’s finale. But still, I’d love to get back to the days when a TV season for a mainstream show involved twenty-four or twenty-five episodes, as opposed to the twenty-two that we get now. (24 is the notable exception, for obvious reasons.) I know it’s not going to happen, because the actors want time to do bad movies and such, but this business of watching three or four new episodes, followed by a two month period in which there might be two new episodes until the next sweeps period, is just grating.

And while I’m griping about TV, it would be cool if ABC could tap into a whole new source of movies, so as to avoid showing Armageddon every two months. And unless my eyes deceived me, they’ve now shown Gladiator twice in the last six months. Ah well….

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