Month: December 2003

Thank God that’s over. I’ve been actively rooting for the Bills since their 1986 season — when Jim Kelly came to town, and when I finally got tired of being the kid in high school who knew nothing about football — and I have to say, they have not had a season this disappointing in all the time I’ve followed them. Not even their 1994 (7-9), 1997 (6-10) or 2001 (3-13) years came close to this, because as I’ve made clear over the year, this was the year I thought they’d compete again. Instead they stumbled, they stumbled often, and they looked terrible in stumbling.

Head coach Gregg Williams is pretty much guaranteed to be sent packing. He won’t be officially “fired”, since his contract is now up; he just won’t be brought back. Very likely offensive coordinator Kevin Gilbride will be gone as well. I am hoping that the defensive and special teams coaches remain, since those units performed fairly well this year. But a new regime will take the field next year. Williams had three years to turn the Bills around, and in today’s NFL, three years is more than enough time to remake a team. He couldn’t get it done, posting an overall record of 17-29 and leaving a team with too many obvious holes to be filled. Those holes, as I see them, are as follows:

:: Offensive line. This was supposed to be a strength this year, but their key young players who were supposed to blossom either failed to do so or spent significant time being hurt. Longtime fixture Ruben Brown, whom nobody thinks deserved to be elected to this year’s Pro Bowl even though he was, missed yesterday’s game due to unexplained “personal reasons”, just days after Brett Favre played for the Packers a day after his father’s death. The line still gave up too many sacks, and the running game never really became consistent. Of course, a lot of that is due to the playcalling, in which the coaches refused to ever even try to establish a rhythm. But the line did not perform as it should have, and I’d be very surprised if next year’s O-line featured the same players as this year’s.

:: Defensive line. This unit was pretty good, but they still didn’t generate enough pressure on opposing quarterbacks. The Bills still need a defensive lineman, maybe an end, who can get sacks on a consistent basis. Plus, pressure would help in creating turnovers, which the Bills were terrible at doing this year.

:: Secondary. As noted above, the Bills need to make more turnovers. They have good tacklers in the secondary (not that you saw much of that yesterday against the Patriots, whose receivers looked like a bunch of Jerry Rice clones in that game), but they haven’t had a real threat to intercept a lot of passes since the days of Henry Jones and Kurt Schulz as the safeties. Cornerback Antoine Winfield is a free agent, and I don’t expect him to be back. But if the Bills can get someone who can actually pick off the ball once in a while, I’m fine with seeing Winfield go.

:: Receivers. I’m not nearly as interested in hand-wringing over Peerless Price’s departure as many others are. I think Josh Reed developed pretty well this year, but you’d never know it to hear Bills fans and Buffalo sportswriters tell the tale. (Reed had 58 catches this year, while Price had 64 for Atlanta.) Bobby Shaw was a decent number three man as well. The receiving corps suffered by Eric Moulds’s inability to really recover from a groin pull midway through the season, and where they really suffered was in something that was completely ignored by nearly everyone who has criticized Drew Bledsoe’s performance: the lack of a strong tight end or receiving back. In Bledsoe’s best years with the Patriots, he always had Ben Coates as a “safety valve” guy to haul in short passes and collect yardage after the catch. I remember watching Bledsoe shred the Bills’ fine mid-1990s defense by using Coates to brilliant effect, and last year, he had Larry Centers and Jay Riemersma to fill that role. This year, he had nobody. I think that was a big factor in Bledsoe’s ineffectiveness this year.

:: Quarterback. OK, here we go on Bledsoe. I’ve been very reluctant to give up on this guy, really, but now I’m of mixed mind. If they can ditch him and bring in a promising youngster, this might well be the time to do it, since there will be a new offensive system being installed next year anyway. I don’t question Bledsoe’s ability, but I have at last begun to question his heart, because he showed no fire, no anger, no leadership as the team started to gyrate this year. Jim Kelly would have circled the wagons; Bledsoe seemed all too often to be circling the drain.

Bledsoe never got in the face of his young offensive linemen when they gave up a sack, something Jim Kelly never hesitated to do. (In 1989, Kelly publicly castigated Howard Ballard for missing a block on a play that led to Kelly getting injured and missing three games; a lot of people in Buffalo got mad at Kelly and called him a jerk for doing that. But Ballard suddenly stepped it up and he became the stalwart of the right side of Buffalo’s Super Bowl-run offensive line.) Just last week, Bledsoe said that Kevin Gilbride’s offensive system is the best in which he’s ever played, which is a bit of an odd statement to make in a year when the Bills are actually setting franchise records for offensive futility. Last year Bledsoe played with fire here; he looked like a guy who really wanted to win. This year he all-too-often looked like a guy desperate to just not look terrible — which, as any football fan knows, is precisely the way to end up looking terrible.

So, if the new coaching regime decides that Bledsoe’s time is over, so be it. But if they stick with Bledsoe, I hope they’re strong-willed enough to commit to running the ball and designing game plans around what Bledsoe’s strengths actually are as opposed to what they think it would be nice if his strengths were. And I’ll be a lot less willing to defend the guy.

More football thoughts tomorrow, now that I’m relegated to “normal fan” status. It’s the one nice thing about having one’s team eliminated.

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Here, by the way, are some sites I found useful in redesigning things here:

:: Webmonkey’s List of Special Characters. I actually don’t use this as often as I should, but it is highly useful.

:: The Visibone Color Palette. This thing is enormously useful in choosing color schemes; it lets you compare shades on a side-by-side basis as well as showing all the available colors.

:: The Absolute Background Textures Archive. I spent a ridiculous amount of time looking through here, but my new backgrounds came from this site (as did my original backgrounds, which still show up as “inlays” in the sidebar).

Surprisingly, the job required no power tools and no use of spackle. (If there’s a more fun home-improvement word than “spackle”, I don’t know what it is!)

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Is The Lord of the Rings great literature? And is Peter Jackson, as John Scalzi says he is, the “better teller of this particular tale”?

I’ve been nursing these thoughts for the better part of a week now — well, more than a week. I really wasn’t sure of how to phrase my position, based as it is on personal opinion as these matters always are. When it comes to objective standards for greatness in art, I’ve always been like Fox Mulder: I want to believe, but I’ve never been able to get there. There is always something incredibly slippery about the whole enterprise, with arguments for a given work’s “greatness” invariably boiling down to criteria that are not definable, and on which disagreement can exist in perfectly logical terms.

I have known professional musicians who adore, say, the music of Bruckner, and I have met music scholars who detest Bruckner. I consider Mozart’s Symphony no. 40 in G minor to be one of the very greatest works in Mozart’s entire corpus, but Glenn Gould — who surely forgot more about music than I’m ever likely to know — described it as “six remarkable measures surrounded by twenty-five minutes of banality”. And it goes on and on: John Scalzi says that The Lord of the Rings is not great literature, but Ursula K. Le Guin says that it is.

Despite the best efforts of people who try to establish “objective” standards of greatness, the feeling I invariably get is that what they’re really trying to objectify is their own opinion or set of opinions. In the many debates on matters like these I have had over the years, it strikes me that the ghost of “objectivity” is always invoked by those seeking to promulgate a negative view of something, even if it’s only slightly negative.

Ultimately, then, I tend to be torn in two directions when it comes to how I view artistic greatness. First, there is the “test of time” argument, since surely a work that persists in public view for a long time, and thereby imposes large influence, probably has some claim to greatness. This, though, might strike some as problematic: is, say, “The Night Before Christmas” a great poem, since it’s still very well known two hundred years or whatever after its composition? Personally, I would have to say that it is, no matter how many scholars and critics might dissect its scansion and message. This may seem to cheapen the idea of “artistic greatness”, but I think I can live with it. Even if it can be factually established beyond doubt that “The Night Before Christmas” is mere doggerel, it’s got to have something going for it to have survived while endless reams of similar doggerel have vanished utterly.

The flip side of the coin, though, is something akin to what Robert Pirsig described (in terms of insanity) as “a culture of one”. Many of us have probably had the experience of being profoundly moved by a work of art that has been pretty much reviled by everyone else. In my case, there are the Star Wars prequels (which, I might add, I’m getting tired of seeing bashed in nearly every Lord of the Rings commentary that exists), and there is Berlioz, who might still be languishing in obscurity if Sir Thomas Beecham and, later, Sir Colin Davis had not found something of estimable worth in France’s most unloved composer. It’s all too easy to observe someone indulging in the belief that something everybody else thinks is lousy is really profound, but all the same, I tend to get uncomfortable when it happens.

I had the experience recently of encountering, on a message board, a fellow who is a really devoted fan of Battlestar Galactica. This struck me as quite odd, as it probably would just about anyone else. I haven’t seen the show in years, but I remember liking it well enough when I was seven and being less than impressed when I caught a rerun or two when I was sixteen. But this guy wasn’t some drooling fanboy: he can go on for really long message-board posts about the themes he admires in Battlestar Galactica, the messages he finds in the episodes, and so on. It’s easy for me to shake my head and think, “Poor soul”….but then I wonder, who am I to gainsay him?

Roger Ebert once wrote (or maybe he quoted someone else) that you can’t explain comedy: either someone laughs, or they don’t. And, rather crudely, he said that the same is true of sexual content: “You can’t talk a man out of an erection.” But if the idea of reducing artistic response to such a level rankles, there is this more elegant expression of the same sentiment by Robert Frost:

It is absurd to think that the only way to tell if a poem is lasting is to wait and see if it lasts. The right reader of a good poem can tell the moment it strikes him that he has taken an immortal wound – that he will never get over it. That is to say, permanence in poetry, as in love, is perceived instantly. It hasn’t to await the test of time. The proof of a poem is not that we have never forgotten it, but we knew at sight we never could forget it.

So it’s not just the test of time that applies. Will The Lord of the Rings still affect readers as it has since its publication? It seems odd to say that it’s not great literature even as one concedes that it will, in all probability, continue to be read.

All this, really, may not be specifically germane to Scalzi’s essay, but I do think he’s trying to establish that, objectively speaking, the Peter Jackson films tell the story of Lord of the Rings better than the J.R.R. Tolkien books do. I’m not sure that his argument, as presented, really works. I’ve read a lot of such arguments over the course of the trilogy’s release in the last two years: people coming forth to say, “You know, I’ve never been able to read more than four chapters of the damn thing, but these movies are wonderful!” But, as someone points out in Scalzi’s comments, certainly the films are more accessible, but accessibility does not equal quality.

Second, Scalzi lists a number of prominent films made from books whose books are now well-less known than their films are. I’m not convinced of his arguments here. First, as he notes, in most of the cases he lists, the films came much sooner after the books than the Lord of the Rings films did. Better examples might include, say, Moby Dick and Ben-Hur. In the former case, I doubt anyone would claim that the various films (even the Gregory Peck version) supplanted the book; Ben-Hur might, though, be a better case in point. Even the liner notes to the score CDs for Ben-Hur make the point that most people would be more likely to think that the film is based on a Bible story, as opposed to a nineteenth century novel by Lew Wallace.

But that brings me to my big objection here: movies are far more visible than books, and they have far greater cultural visibility. A movie which flops still sells more tickets than a best-seller sells copies these days; I’ll bet more people saw “Gigli” in theaters than have read Dave Eggers’s book A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, and it’s a foregone conclusion that more people know what Gigli is than the Eggers book. There is a kind of “supplanting” of books by their movies which is pretty-much inevitable, so I don’t think this really bolsters Scalzi’s argument here. Even a bad movie of a good book stands a pretty good chance of supplanting the book. Just look at some of the lesser James Bond movies: Live and Let Die is just wretched, and Moonraker is a pretty lousy movie too. Neither bear much resemblance to their books, which are quite good – but I’m not even sure if Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels are even in print right now. And even in the case of Harry Potter, it wouldn’t much surprise me if even now more people have seen the first two movies than read the first two books, phenomenon that they are. That more people know the movies than know the books in all these cases doesn’t seem to me to point to a specific preference for these particular movies, but rather leads me to suspect a general preference for movies in general.

Just a couple of more points on this whole business. Scalzi makes what seems to me an odd assertion that argues that since Jackson had to take significant liberties with Tolkien’s story to make it work on the screen, this somehow demonstrates the weakness of Tolkien’s original material. This is not a good argument. Taking a story from one medium and transposing it into another always requires significant shifts in form (witness the changes made in all those Shakespeare plays that got turned into operas). That Verdi had to make quite a few changes to Othello for his opera Otello in no way implies that the original play was somehow faulty. (Just wait until some deluded soul tries to film Cryptonomicon!)

I also disagree that Jackson got all of Tolkien’s themes into the films. Yes, a lot of them are there, but some of them are, frankly, inadequately treated if at all. I’ve commented, at each film’s release, that Jackson doesn’t seem to get the “passing of an Age” feel at all, nor do I think he gets the religiosity of Tolkien. The omission of the Scouring of the Shire is fine from a cinematic standpoint, but from a thematic standpoint, it falters pretty seriously. (As I noted last week, this omission really mutes Frodo’s realization in the film that the Shire is no longer his home. I didn’t think this worked in the movie. In the book, it does.)

Scalzi also pretty much takes it as a given that Tolkien’s prose is weak and the poetry is bad. Now, I am certainly no expert on poetry; I read more poetry than the usual person, but I still know very little about its technical aspects. Still, I always enjoy the poems and songs when I read Lord of the Rings. As for the prose, well, I couldn’t disagree more. The Lord of the Rings has long been one of my favorite “dipping” books — i.e., a book I love to just open up and peruse favorite passages, and Tolkien’s language is to my ear wondrous. Stylistically, I love how he opens the story in a slightly more-adult version of the tone he used in The Hobbit, but then gradually shifts the tone to “epic heroism” as the Fellowship’s journey begins; likewise, I love how he uses a return to the more “earthy” tone in the last chapters to highlight the changes in Frodo’s world. And there are specific passages, such as the closing paragraphs of the chapter “The Siege of Gondor”, which rank with the greatest paragraphs I’ve ever read.

And finally, there is characterization. I’ve seen lots of comments by people online that they can’t get into Tolkien’s books because they’re interested in characters, which I find to be a completely befuddling statement, because I find Tolkien’s characters far, far more compellingly drawn than their Jackson analogues. (Gollum excepted, of course, but even there Jackson does that weird thing with Gollum poisoning Frodo against Sam in Return of the King.) Samwise Gamgee is so much more complex in the book, as is Gimli; the Aragorn-and-Elrond relationship is more than just “Stay away from my daughter!”; et cetera. The films take broader strokes with the characters, but to my mind they are shallower than Tolkien’s. In a lot of ways this is necessary to make the books filmable in less than, say, eight hours per movie. But I can’t get behind the idea that Jackson has improved on Tolkien’s characterizations.

Of course, many of my objections here can boil down to the expression of taste. But that, really, may be my ultimate point: the films may supplant the books for the masses, but that doesn’t mean they will for people of a more literary bent; and even if they do, well, so what? For me, the books are indisputably great literature.

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I watched the Kennedy Center Honors on Friday night, and as always, it was thrilling to see five wonderful artists paid tribute for their careers. This year the honorees were country singer Loretta Lynn, film director Mike Nichols, soul singer James Brown, violinist Itzhak Perlman, and actress/comedian Carol Burnett. A worthy bunch, every one. And as always, the show was a delight, although I wonder if it was taped on a night when President Bush was either incredibly tired or sick or something. He looked curiously unenthusiastic, barely even laughing when his own father, President Bush the Elder, cracked a joke at his expense during a speech for Loretta Lynn.

Last year I listed some folks I thought might deserve being future Kennedy Center Honorees, and I’ll repeat that exercise now, since I have at least five more readers than I did last year. Feel free to comment, if either to lob tomatoes at my suggestions or, better, to offer suggestions of people I’ve forgotten.

:: Filmmakers (Directors, Producers, Screenwriters)

Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese, James Cameron, George Lucas, Stanley Donen, Ron Howard, Lawrence Kasdan, William Goldman, David Mamet, Rob Reiner, Robert Zemeckis.

:: Actors and Actresses

Harrison Ford, Meryl Streep, Michael Douglas, Tom Hanks, John Cleese, Robert Redford, Jodie Foster, Anthony Hopkins, Denzel Washington, Julia Roberts, Robert DeNiro, Diane Keaton, Lily Tomlin

:: Music – Classical and Jazz

John Williams, Lorin Maazel, Leonard Slatkin, Daniel Barenboim, Philip Glass, John Corigliano, Anne Sophie-Mutter, Kathleen Battle, Yo Yo Ma, Wynton Marsalis, Chick Corea.

:: Popular Music

Phil Collins, Lionel Richie, Bruce Springsteen, Van Morrison. (As I noted last year, I’m not sure how “stodgy” the Kennedy Center would be toward musicians like Edward Van Halen.)

:: Television and Comedy

David Letterman, George Carlin (although, again subject to stodginess), Jerry Seinfeld, Ken Burns, Dick Clark, Stephen Bochco.

In putting forth these names, I mainly went by the body of work produced, although in some cases I am not at all sure that body of work exists as of now.

(EDIT: As noted, I simply reposted the above list from a similar post of a year ago, without noticing that last year’s list included Itzhak Perlman who was honored this year. So I edited his name out. Oops.)

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OK. In the last month, Atrios has linked Adam Yoshida (a right-winger who is so loony that he actually thinks that if China’s economy gets too strong, the United States should engineer a worldwide depression to bring China back to its proper third-world status) twice (here and here).

And Atrios has never linked me.

Why yes, I would like some cheese with my whine, please!

(UPDATE: And now Demosthenes links Yoshida’s insanity. Ye Gods….)

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For those checking in today or Monday, yes, this is the new look, aside from the masthead image which will stay for another week or two. My design skills are not to mocked. Hear me roar!

(However, I must note that I actually uploaded the new look yesterday, on Saturday. So if this is the first time you’re seeing it, you’re a slacker. I’m saying this because we all know that insulting one’s audience is the key to salvation.)

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Terry Teachout on Meet Me In St. Louis, which I agree is one of the most underrated musicals of all time. It’s a pure confection, but what a confection it is! (Although I can name several films with songs as good as the three Mr. Teachout names from Meet Me…: Singin’ in the Rain, My Fair Lady, Brigadoon, The Music Man and The Sound of Music leap to mind.)

This reminds me of the last time I watched Meet Me in St. Louis. I was in the mood for a musical, and preferably one I hadn’t seen in a while (i.e., one that I didn’t already own), so I went to Blockbuster and checked out their musical selection. Not particularly good selection, but then, that’s not really a surprise, is it? Anyway, they had a copy of Meet Me…, so that’s what I got. When I took it to the counter, the Blockbuster employee bursts out enthusiastically: “Oh, Meet Me In St. Louis! That’s one of my favorite movies ever!” Except, you see, if you’ve seen the movie and heard the song, you know it’s pronounced “Meet Me In St. Louie“, but she said it “Meet Me In St. Lewis”.

I did manage to withhold my knowing belly-laugh until I got to the car.

I wanted to go back the next day and rent something like Shoah to see if she’d react that way again, but I never did get around to it. (As if Blockbuster would have a copy of Shoah, anyway.)

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One of the most striking sequences in Carl Sagan’s classic PBS series Cosmos was his illustration of how evolutionary selection works: the bit about the Heike crabs in Japan. These are crabs whose shells bear features that look strikingly like the face of a Samurai warrior, so the fishermen tend to throw these crabs back into the water, in remembrance of a legendary battle that took place in that particular region many centuries ago. Over centuries of such behavior on the part of the fishermen, a sort of “artificial selection” took place:

How does it come about that the face of a warrior is incised on the carapace of a crab? The answer seems to be that humans made the face. The patterns on the crab’s shell are inherited. But among crabs, as among people, there are many different hereditary lines. Suppose that, by chance, among the distant ancestors of this crab, one arose with a pattern that resembled, even slightly, a human face. Even before the battle of Danno-ura, fishermen may have been reluctant to eat such a crab. In throwing it back, they set in motion an evolutionary process: If you are a crab and your carapace is ordinary, the humans will eat you. Your line will leave fewer descendants. If your carapace looks a little like a face, they will throw you back. You will leave more descendants. Crabs had a substantial investment in the patterns on their carapaces. As the generations passed, of crabs and fishermen alike, the crabs with patterns that most resembled a samurai face survived preferentially until eventually there was produced not just a human face, not just a Japanese face, but the visage of a fierce and scowling samurai. All this has nothing to do with what the crabs want. Selection is imposed from the outside. The more you look like a samurai, the better are your chances of survival. Eventually, there come to be a great many samurai crabs.

To this day, that is the most elegant illustration of external selection in nature that I’ve ever read. So where’s the weirdness?

Well, Sagan’s “Tale of the Heike Crabs” is really, really elegant and haunting. The “Tale of the Barbie Lobsters”, though, is really, really weird.

(via Paul Riddell)

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A few days ago I pointed out a rather odd fellow I’ve noted online, and in comments he took exception to what I said (which I thought was actually pretty tame, but what do I know). He made a point of telling me that his first novel has been accepted for publication, presumably as a “So there!” type of thing after I had commented on a highly unprofessional letter he had once written to a magazine editor (which the magazine printed). I asked him which publisher had accepted his work, but he never answered.

But in the midst of his entry for today (no permalinks, but it will have its own link in his sidebar when he supplants it with his next post) it turns out that his publisher is Publish America, which is basically the “next generation” of vanity publishing. Or, as this person calls it, the “Amway of publishing”. (Not to disparage Darren on this particular point; he seems to be genuinely aware of what’s going on.)

Teresa Nielsen Hayden had a superb post a while back in which she described the evolution of vanity publishing, now that they have moved beyond the standard model of “You pay us and we’ll print your book”. Reading that article, and the articles that she links in turn, puts me in mind of a joke that the ill-fated Japanese businessman, Mr. Takagi, says in Die Hard: “We [the Japanese] are flexible. Pearl Harbor didn’t work out, so we’ll get you with tape decks.”

Vanity publishing can have its place, in certain scenarios. If you have a book that you know will have a minuscule audience and you have no interest or desire in an audience any larger than that, a vanity house is probably fine — say, the tale of your family’s ancestral immigration to America from Old Europe, or a cookbook collecting the contents of your great-grandmother’s recipe box. But that’s about it.

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I’ve been meaning to mention this for a week or so, but if anyone out there pings Weblogs.com when they update (a wise practice), they have recently redesigned things over there, so if you use a bookmarked version of their “ping” page, you’ll need to go to their main page, do a new manual ping of your blog, and then bookmark the new “ping results” page for use in the future.

Oh, and where Weblogs.com used to accept a ping every five minutes, they’ve backed that off to one ping every thirty minutes.

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