Month: April 2004

Andrew Cory suggests that when John Kerry debates President Bush this fall, he should explicitly mention the fact that he still has a piece of shrapnel embedded in his posterior. I’m not really sure this is a good idea; in my mind at least, if Kerry did this I would be forced to envision Christopher Walken telling a little boy, “I hid this uncomfortable hunk of metal up my ass for two years….”

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Actually, is it stealing the government’s bandwidth, since I’m a citizen and I pay taxes and all that? Hmmmm….anyway, time for my standard “Too tired to blog, but wanting my posts to take up more space on the front page” trick of swiping a recent Astronomy Picture of the Day. Here are some nebulae:

For more details, go here. Weirdly, the APOD site uses nebulas as the plural of nebula instead of nebulae, which I always thought was correct but which I now see by looking it up that nebulas is an acceptable plural form after all. I don’t know, it all seems pretty nebulous to me.

Bada-BING!

(By the way, I see via Patrick Nielsen Hayden that NASA has recently discovered that politics trumps science in the Bush Administration. Oh, goody.)

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Here’s an experiment for the comment thread: a discussion question. Because, you know, I’m tired and scraping the bottom of an already shallow mental barrel for blog stuff. Here’s the question:

Would it be fair to say that the scene in A New Hope immediately following Ben Kenobi’s death — when Luke is torn between escaping with his friends on the waiting Millennium Falcon and standing his ground against the stormtroopers (and, presumably, Darth Vader) to avenge Ben — constitutes the first time Luke is tempted by the Dark Side of the Force?

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Say what you will about Drew Bledsoe’s recent performance with the Bills — 2003 in particular — the fact is that Bledsoe is still a classy guy. Today he agreed to a restructuring of his contract, which as most NFL contracts do these days would have put him into stratospheric heights with respect to the salary cap after this year. Now the Bills are no longer virtually committed to dumping Bledsoe after the 2004 season, which gives them enormous flexibility: if Bledsoe tanks in 2004, they can get rid of him more cheaply and move on to the J.P. Losman era, or if Bledsoe returns to form, they can keep him and give Losman another year of development in 2005. And the money not being spent now on Bledsoe means that the team may be able to pick up an additional free agent or two to plug into whatever holes still need filled.

I personally never viewed Bledsoe as anything more than “the guy to play while they groom the next guy”, but it’s nice that the Bills will have flexibility to really spend their time carefully developing the next guy.

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Posting here may be a bit light this week due to a rather intensive period at work. The Company has decided to operate a full-blown Garden Center at The Store, which is a sort-of “prototype” operation that will be replicated at other locations next year if we’re successful this year. Last week saw the construction of the Garden Center. This week sees the delivery of plants. Lots and lots and lots of plants. Today I helped unload the first three deliveries, totaling almost a thousand plants (and by “plants”, I also include trees and shrubberies [Ni!]). And when I left for the day, the fourth truck was waiting in the wings. So between all that hefting of plants, wallowing in dirt and potting soil, moving wooden pallets around, and climbing into and out of the backs of semis, I’m really rather tired.

(But hey, I got to drive a forklift. That’s always fun. I haven’t been able to drive a forklift in over ten years. There is no finer macho toy than a forklift, if you’re a guy who doesn’t actually have to drive one on a regular basis.)

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Buffalo Congressman Jack Quinn, a Republican from Hamburg (one of Buffalo’s Southtowns), has announced his retirement this year. This could be a good seat for Democrats to pick up: the district is predominantly Democratic to begin with, and Quinn himself was a political moderate (he spearheaded a move to raise the minimum wage and has been fairly labor-friendly, by Republican standards). I’m excited as a Democrat at the prospect of a pickup here, but Quinn was a good advocate in Congress for Buffalo, and that’s a legacy that needs to stand. This city needs all the help it can get.

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Yep, with the return of the NFL to the front of the sports page on Draft Weekend comes another wonderful article by Buffalo News sportswriter Jerry Sullivan, in which he points out that even after the draft, the Bills still aren’t as good as the Patriots, as if it was possible for the Bills to make up that deficit in a single draft.

Keep up the great work, Jerry.

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PZ Myers has three book memes in one post. One of which is The List, which I’ve already discussed, but I’ll take on the other two. First is simple: what are my rules of what constitutes a good story?

I guess I’d lead off by saying that I don’t think there are any “rules” for fiction; better, probably, to try to describe what characteristics are common to stories I love. With that in mind, here I go:

1. Don’t depress me. This is big: I don’t like stories that are just depressing. But this does not rule out sad endings, because “sad” does not equal “depressing”. Likewise, “dark” (or “gothic” or “downbeat”) also do not equal “depressing”. Schindler’s List is a terribly sad movie; Seven is a depressing one. I guess the difference is that sadness can still seem to serve a purpose, whereas depression is without purpose: it’s just there. I don’t want a story in which characters are subjected to just one damn thing after another, with no hope at all for a respite or even a good lesson learned beyond “Life sucks”. If I want “Life sucks”, well, I’ll just look at, you know, life.

2. Engage my emotions. This goes hand-in-hand with “Don’t depress me”. Even though I don’t want to feel depression after reading or viewing a story, I do want to feel something. A story that is the emotional equivalent of an unsalted saltine cracker is not a story for me.

3. Tie up your loose ends. Unless you don’t want to. I tried coming up with a better way to say this, but I can’t. I love both kinds of stories I’m talking about here, really: I love it when everything ties up into a neat little package, and I also love it when a story lets some things stay open, as if to suggest that the story was really just a segment of someone’s life that we’ve just watched. Guy Gavriel Kay does the latter a lot; John Bellairs does the former. Either works.

4. But if you’re gonna tie up your loose ends, be careful about it. Too often, a “no loose ends” book or movie starts to feel like one: about two-thirds or three-quarters of the way through, you start to notice a relentless pace at which one thread is tied up every few pages or minutes or so. And then there’s Neal Stephenson, who leaves everything in the air until the last ten pages, and then whammo! It’s all bundled up with duct tape and baling wire. That’s not satisfying, really.

5. Great stuff along the way will make me forgive a crappy ending. But the stuff along the way had better be really great.

6. Beware the surprise ending, or the shocking revelation. I love being surprised in stories, but the surprises have to arise logically out of the content of the story, so even if I didn’t see it coming, I can still reexamine the story and see the clues and note the construction by which the surprise or revelation comes. A great example of how not to handle this is the movie Basic Instinct, whose final shot reveals whether or not a certain character is the murderer. The way the story has been constructed, it could have gone either way and made equal sense. That’s bad storytelling.

7. Show me something new along the way. Discovery is cool. And it doesn’t have to even be something totally new; it can just be a new way of looking at something really familiar. Don’t be ordinary.

8. The word “said” should comprise at least 97% of your dialogue attributions. And for the love of God, please don’t use “ejaculated” as a verb of dialogue attribution. I can’t read about someone “ejaculating” a sentence without thinking of that one scene in There’s Something About Mary.

Finally, I can probably distill all this into a single, three-part rule: Don’t bore me, don’t make me feel bad for having been told your story, and don’t do anything that breaks the spell you’re trying to weave.

I could probably come up with lots more, but you probably get the idea. You probably also get the idea that I’m a pretty permissive reader. That I am, and I’ve never made any bones about it: I tend to like lots of stories, of different kinds, told in different ways.

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There are suddenly a lot of book memes circulating. While I’ll take a pass on the “List the great books you’ve read” one, here’s one via Wil Duquette that I like: listing the ten books that had the biggest impact on my life.

Now, it’s really hard to do this, now that I’ve been thinking of it for a day or two. It’s tough to gauge impact, because I find that books can often lay in the tall grass, so to speak, for many years — I’ll read them, file them away in my brain, and then suddenly discover later on how they moved me in one direction or another. I’ve waffled on a lot of these titles, and who knows, I may come back and change them later. Anyway, here are ten books, some of which won’t be a surprise to longtime readers. (These are in no particular order, and as I tend to do in “List” posts, I cheat. A lot.)

1. Cosmos, Carl Sagan. To this day, this is still the book that has influenced my overall worldview regarding the Universe and our place within it more than any other. I find so much more awe, so much more poetic beauty, so much more reverence in a Universe that is billions of years old and through physical processes eventually gave rise to life and consciousness than I do in the idea of a static Universe popped into being in just six days, six thousand years ago. The science of this book may be out of date, but I don’t care. As far as I am concerned, it is a towering achievement of twentieth century science writing.

2. The Lord of the Rings, J.R.R. Tolkien. It’s pretty obvious why, I think.

3. Salem’s Lot, Stephen King. This is the first out-and-out horror book I read, once I was ready to really delve into the genre.

4. On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft, Stephen King. This book provided the answers to questions I didn’t even know I had.

5. 2001: A Space Odyssey, Arthur C. Clarke. I’m pretty sure I read some science fiction before this, but this one cemented my love of the genre for all time. And not only that, this book showed me what was possible in the genre besides Star Wars space opera and Star Trek “sociological” SF.

6. The Prydain Chronicles, Lloyd Alexander. (Yeah, it’s a five book set, actually. Deal with it.) My first encounter with epic fantasy, two years before Tolkien.

7. Tigana, Guy Gavriel Kay. It’s not my favorite GGK novel, but it’s the first that I read, and in the same way 2001 pushed me beyond my original idea of what SF was, Tigana broadened my horizons of what fantasy can do.

8. The Joy of Music and The Infinite Variety of Music, Leonard Bernstein. I group these together because the content of each — essays, teleplays from Bernstein’s TV programs, interviews — are so similar in style and tone. These two books shaped my love of music more than any others. I always adored Bernstein’s ability to adore and venerate a very wide range of music, and I have always tried to follow his example. (This is a man who would as soon conduct Mozart as he would David Diamond.)

9. Dungeon, Fire and Sword: The Knights Templar in the Crusades, John J. Robinson. A fascinating era of history, engagingly written by a writer who didn’t produce nearly enough books.

10. The Book of Marvels, Richard Halliburton. This man’s travel writings, all of which roughly correspond to the years between the two World Wars, are a clinic on how to convey “sense of wonder”. Track down a copy, and when you read it, try to ignore the obvious anachronisms (like the fairly obvious “white man’s superiority” stuff, which is par for the course for the book’s day).

And, you know, why not a couple of honorable mentions:

11. Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud can teach you a great deal about storytelling, and not just about comics.

12. The follow-up, Reinventing Comics, is less about storytelling and more about the possibilities inherent in a digital age.

13. Adventures in the Screen Trade and Which Lie Did I Tell? More Adventures in the Screen Trade William Goldman. These will also teach you a great deal about storytelling; and for me, they pretty much squashed any idea that I’d ever try to sell a film script. (Not that I could sell the ones I’ve already written, of course, because they’re Star Wars fan-fictions.)

14. The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark, Carl Sagan. Essential reading, really, in this age of belief in UFOs and holeopathic medicine and various other nonsense items.

15. The House with a Clock in its Walls, John Bellairs. Just because Bellairs is a favorite author of mine, and this is the first of his that I read. Gothic fiction for kids. Great stuff.

16. Danny, the Champion of the World by Roald Dahl. Humor, warmth, darkness, cruelty, love, pain, redemption, and the perfect ending. All in one book.

OK, that’s it. For now. (I told you I cheat!)

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One blog meme which I will not be picking up is the big list of great books that’s going around, the idea being to bold the one’s you’ve read. (You can see the list here, in Lynn Sislo’s version.) I won’t be doing this list because for one thing, I think it’s a pretty odd — it includes Shelley’s Frankenstein, but not Stoker’s Dracula, for example, and I’m not really sure how to count some works. There are things I read in high school to which I have not given a single thought since, so much so that I couldn’t possibly talk intelligently about them beyond saying “Yeah, I read that in high school.” Would that count? And while I haven’t read Pygmalion since high school, does it count that I know My Fair Lady by heart?

But more than that, I prefer to maintain my belief that I am actually a fairly well-read individual, and posting visual evidence that I’ve not read the vast majority of those books would do damage to my self-image. And I’m all about self-image, you know. Uhh….or something like that.

And then there’s Jason’s copy of the list. Man, is he well-read. Yeesh. It reminds me of an exchange in an episode of The West Wing, when Josh Lyman glances over Charlie Young’s shoulder at his school transcripts as Charlie is filling out college applications:

JOSH: Charlie, just how smart are you?

CHARLIE: I got some game.

Jason’s got some game, too.

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